I have just finished reading Jean Paul Sartre’s “The Words” (Les Mots). This book has really gotten me to think about my childhood from a very different point of view. I used to think what I did was a manifestation of me, I never thought of it as imitation. But I probable was just imitating the grownups, my only companions in our small universe – our apartment.

Kindergarten and my little friends from the block were probably the reason that kept me real. But I always loved to please my parent, to impress the grownups. At about four I was my fathers pride, as I was able to learn short fables (Lev Tolstoi’s from a little book I have later read several times) by heart and reproduce them with the book open with such accuracy, that our guests actually thought I was reading.

The reading part come a bit later, at about 5. It wasn’t my parents idea to teach me. It was just that they used to read after work and I wanted to do the same. So I just told them I wanted to read. I started learning the letter and the first word I ever read was “Flacarile” (Flames), the title of a book that I only read a year ago. The first book I read was “Fram, The Polar Bear”, a quite large book, with lots of pictures, followed by “The Jungle Book”, in the very same format.

I remember this huge smile I had on my face when I ran into the kitchen screaming I could read. They all came to the living room to see the show: there I was a small, tiny little girl standing by a huge bookshelf (we have always had a few thousand books in our living room) and pointing to the book whose title I managed to read…

Then writing came as another means of impressing people (grownups and kids all the same) A secondary school student writing a novel about a girl-bull fighter from Spain…My Geography teacher was impressed! Then in high-school my target was the Literature teacher – the means, essays and the only novel I ever finished. She checked it, said it was good and that I should go on trying to publish it.

I didn’t. You might wonder why…Well the novel was never good enough for me! The hardest person to convince, impress and mesmerize was me…See I was always a great student in my first 12 years in school (before university). People admired me. Yes, but there were two persons that actually knew what a lazy time waster I was: my mom and I. While my colleagues thought I was spending all day long studying to get to be that good, we knew I was always studying in the last moment, with fear deep inside my bones.

It was always easy for me to learn, study, and for most subjects the information was not lost, although to an outsider my way of learning might have seemed mechanical. But I knew my full capacity was never tried out at least. Maybe only for a few hours a day…But I got tired of it and never even tried to push my limits. I’d rather read a book or write one, watch TV or have a walk…

I’m still the same person, although I try very hard to get myself on track, to finally use the maximum of what I have, to stop wasting it. But the easy way is sooo tempting, even for an almost grownup.