Humans have personality quirks, something that sets them apart from the nameless masses. It was not hard for me to recognize my quirk at an early age, being different from my classmates from the very beginning. My quirk and what I would call my passion first awoke as I strived to learn how to read very early, viciously attempting to grasp at the knowledge hidden from me, seen so easily by my parents as I asked them time and time again to read for me whenever they were able. Whenever they were too busy I would sit by myself and stare at the words until over time I unraveled the mysteries of the words, becoming the youngest student among my peers able to read upon entering elementary school. Thus my school days until high school became a blur of books, but more importantly, stories.

Stories, and my aptitude for them, is what I would call my quirk. In the stories I read I lost myself, living for days at a time in a world separate from my own. Leaving these worlds at the end of a book was almost always uncomfortable; closing a book and looking up, almost confused to find myself seated firmly in reality. Many times people questioned me why I enjoyed reading so much, and I often struggled to explain that in no other way could I so firmly transplant myself into another world, feeling myself in the place of the characters, feeling their emotions and seeing with their eyes. No silver-screen adaptation can match the vivid scenes fabricated by one’s own mind. Consequently, as I learned to love stories, so too I loved to become a part of stories.

Part of keeping my nose buried in a book as a child was inevitably developing a slight lack of social skills and a shy demeanor. My sophomore year of high school however, I took an intro to acting class that left me stunned. Here I learned not only how to reverse my pattern of antisocial behavior but more amazing still, how to become those characters whom before I had simply possessed as some spectral extension of myself. Here I found a bridge between the worlds I lost myself in as a child and the one I found myself in outside closed books. Now I had found how to take this quirk of mine and apply it as a talent and as a student.

I say love for stories is my personality quirk, and it is, but a quirk is usually a side note on a persons psyche. My quirk however, defines me and how I live my life; my story. It has helped me to educe an intense love for the world that I once only found in books; to see my fellow human beings as my fellow actors, and ultimately, to mature. Most importantly, my quirk has kept me similiar to my adolescent self, preserving a thirst for knowledge akin to that of a young child desperate to learn how to read.