Personal Narrative Essay: Exploring Childhood Experiences and Impact

This essay presents a personal narrative exploring the author's experiences between the ages of ten and thirteen, focusing on the profound influence of their maternal grandmother. The narrative details the grandmother's storytelling, which sparked the author's imagination and curiosity, positively impacting their academic performance. The essay also recounts a contrasting experience involving peer pressure and experimentation with smoking, leading to parental disappointment and a loss of trust. The author reflects on the lasting impact of both experiences, highlighting the enduring influence of the grandmother's values and the consequences of dishonesty, showcasing the complexities of adolescence and personal growth.

Running Head: ENGLISH
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Name of the Student
Name of the University
Authors Note

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Between the years ten and thirteen of my age, I was really attached to my maternal
grandmother who use to come stay in our place. My mother comes from a joint family and
she has four siblings as well. During those days, I was in early teen age and there was so
much, I wanted to learn and know about the world, about its future and past. After getting
promoted to sixth standard, I suddenly realised that my openness to the world has increased
drastically and my quest for social and scientific knowledge, was attempting to take a leap.
My paternal grandparents were already deceased and my parents were both working. I had
very few friends in my residential housing and in my school, comparatively, I had more
friends. After coming back to home from school, I use to talk to my grandmother and spend
time with her, in the afternoon. She use to tell me stories of her childhood that she spent in a
small township, from where she belongs and how towns are different from metropolitan cities
in terms of culture and age. According to her in towns, time moves and flows slowly
compared to the big cities, in which we were living currently. She enlightened me that people
in towns and villages are more diligent and resilient, wise and god fearing as compared to the
people living in the cities who are more complex, have a chaotic mindset, bunch of atheists
driven towards materialistic ways of life which she had very little interest in, when she was
married to a urban man and first moved to this city about fifty years from now. Fifty, I used
to calculate the number was almost five times of my age and I imagined, it would take a
quantum leap in a time machine to travel back to that space and time, which made the
timeline and settings of most of her stories about and the fact that she seven five, which
meant she has lived another twenty five years before her moving to this city where people
was swift, rapid, robotic, calculative and do not have time for each other (that I have seen that
in my friend’s group as well and how my parents just got to spend one day in a week,
completely with each other). I remembered that she stayed with us, for an entire winter
season. My grandmother’s presence in my life was a bliss, in that winter, her stories and

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folktales about ghosts, mythical ships and horses, her adventures in the forests that covered
every third edge of her home town, the shadows of nocturnal trees swirling in the dark and
hearing about how she was captivated by the sight of this nocturnal world that she believed
existed only in her town – gave me a million escapades from the hard boiled routine of life,
where the flat books and lunging bags weighted more than me. She influenced my
imagination, in such a subtle and powerful way and I could use the same in my academics,
almost unknowingly, that started to fetch me better marks than my previous years. In that
winter, I remember her feeding me on many days and I felt a bond so deep and profound with
her, that was almost like a mother child bond. After she died when I was just 13years old, it
left almost a scar in my life and her memories of saving me in those days, when I had nobody
– left me in an absence that is completely inexplicable. Her influence was more than positive
in my life and the fact, she has seen a life more wholesome than many other scholars in my
life, still continues to inspire to this day.
My friends took me out for a smoke and my family, like most other families are
strictly against all these addiction behaviours. I wanted to experiment with a cigarette and my
friends wanted to smoke weed, and I thought both were cool and something I should explore
as all my friends of that age have already known the feel of it. After smoking weed, I entered
the trance for the first time and it was overweighing and after reaching home, my parents
understood that something is wrong and there must be something dangerous that I have
plunged into. When they questioned me, I was still and silent, and then they asked if I am
alright. I said in the end that I am just not feeling well because I was stressed with studies and
rushed to my room and fell asleep. Next day, when I woke up it was almost 3 in the noon and
I realised not going to school for the class test, which was really important. I lied to my
parents and although they understood somehow what I was up to, because I did not say the
truth, they lost trust in me.

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