Life Is Not a Fairy Tale by Fantasia (books for students to read .TXT) 📗

squeezing into our too-tight shorts to walk the projects, we never once mentioned diseases or death and the impact they would have on our children.

It’s pretty simple, but it seems like it’s really hard for us. What is so hard about sayin’ no when your life is at stake? Not just your being alive, but thequality of your life. When you have children that you aren’t ready for, all of your dreams just melt away. It’s not easy being a mama who never lived her dreams, and it’s not easy looking at one.

But I don’t blame myself anymore, because in those days, I thought my life was nothing to protect. It seemed that death was something that happened often enough that everyone around me had almost lost the fear of it. The aftermath of death was something that we got used to. Being from the ghetto changes your feelings about life and death. Death is just something that happens to people when they’re not lookin’. The news of death is just something new to do when the boredom gets to be too much. The news of murders, car accidents caused by drunk drivers, gangs and drug overdoses travels around town fast like the news of how big the lottery was that week. Funeral arrangements and telling the whole town are all “somethin’ to do” for people who never have nothin’ to do. When the funeral is over and the excitement of death has died down again, everyone returns to what they were doing before. At least for that short period, life around death was exciting. With that as a backdrop for my life and for so many young bored people in America, life is not such a big deal. Being careless with life just seemed like what everyone did.

My third mistake was dropping out of school. That was my biggest mistake ever, and I pay for it every day. You see, I’m what I would call a functionin’ illiterate. That means that I “get by” in life, but my readin’ isn’t what it should be.I am workin’ on it. I am still not confident enough with words or letters. If I see a word that I’m not familiar with, I still getscared. Sometimes I don’t even know how to begin to pronounce them or even how to sound the letters out. Not a day goes by that I’m not ashamed about my situation. If you hand me a newspaper, I just look at the pictures and try to figure out what happened. I do recognize the common words like “death” and “money,” “taxes,” “president,” “baby,” “marriage,” and “rich,” but most big words or too many words together just scare me. I know that this is a shock. This is one of those private mistakes that will no longer be private once this hits the news. That is why when I sign my autograph I draw my lips. When people ask me to write a special message, I have trouble forming words right on the spot, so I write something short like “Be Blessed” or something like that, something that I already know how to write. Whatever I write, I mean it from my heart.

Although I got to ninth grade, I forgot a lot of things. I had never made good grades except for that one time in Charlotte, when I actually sat and listened to what the teachers were saying, but that was a long time ago. It was the only time that I wasn’t distracted with dreams of B. cloudin’ my brain. I know that I’m smart. I’m just noteducated. I used to say that I was never blessed with “smarts.” But I feel differently now. I’m blessed with “smarts” because I haven’t given up and I will learn to read all of the words there are to read someday soon. That is my promise to myself.

You must think I’m crazy to put my business out here like this, but the reason I’m doing this is to go behind the gossip and let you know that this is one mistake thatno one should ever make.Ever. In those days, when I was thinkin’ I was being cool by not going to school, I didn’t realize that the coolest part of my life should have been spending my days at Montlieu Elementary School. A Laurin Welborn Middle School, and T. Wingate Andrews High School. The coolest part of my nights should have been struggling with math homework and writing papers. Most of my friends were actually going to school and learnin’ somethin’, and I was at home lookin’ stupid—watchin’ TV, not being able to read, not being able to count. In those days, I didn’t even feel comfortable counting.

Truthfully, I never applied for many jobs, because I couldn’t fill out the application. Whenever I tried, I left so many questions blank because I couldn’t read them that the applications always ended up in the garbage. That is dumb,plain out dumb. This is how you see that one big mistake just creates another one. It’s a chain reaction.

I was embarrassed and ashamed and I still am, despite theIdol competition, despite the pictures in magazines, despite my improved self-esteem. I was stupid for not stayin’ in school. And the private part of my shame is that I want to be as smart as everyone else. I want to be wise about my own money, I want to be able to understand a contract that’s presented to me and not have to ask someone else what it means. I want to be able to read a script and take it home and think about it on my own time instead of needing someone to go through it with me. I want to be able to think for myself and not have to walk around with people all the time, helping me get through the simplest things. My public mistake is that I didn’t finish school. My private mistake is that, although I’m talking about