Sssh! I make a confession

 I have a confession to make. I like depicting the world in pictures and not through lousy rules behind words. But am a bad artist and hush... I hate English. I hate the rules of the language. At nursery I hated the alphabets. I never could grasp the order of the letters..A,B,C,D..G. 

I hated the rules, the order, so I failed and scored 8/100 in my first English test. I liked the shape of that 8, neatly rounded in red but my teacher was unhappy, my parents being Professors of English were devastated.  The stress of it often had me howling in English class

I know it is an odd problem but that is how my brain functions. I can write, in fact I have a faint reputation among some people for a writing style(who are unaware of my real self). They say I have a way with words only I know how I still struggle to keep the order and the rules right. I love playing with words. I mean 'The cat kills the mouse' appeals to me less than does 'kills the mouse the cat"  which still to me is less appealing than the picture of a cat killing a mouse. I hated my English classes for the rules of grammar, for those horrid punctuation marks... I felt frustrated tears fill me as i struggled to learn the rules

I felt my freedom of expression at risk with the tortuous rules of the language. I felt it was worse than a Hindi class  which always set me imagining a table marrying a chair. (anything under the sun had a gender). The world still does not know my dark secret. A short story I wrote when I was  thirteen years old was copyrighted and prescribed for school children by Blackie Books. When I received the copyright copy people thought I was brilliant, Only I know how I struggled to work out the language exercises at the end of my story which genuine linguists had framed using my story as text.

I have been wrongly given the gold medal in literature throughout the course of study, advanced tests of English language passed me but I tell you I will fail in a test of the order of alphabets or for that matter test my punctuation and rules of grammar. True  there is a record of my Doctoral work .

but trust me I really cannot remember the order of the alphabets and I still make a comma look like a semi colon because am not sure what makes  one curve different from the other.  The system is amiss or maybe it just missed out on my inability.Destiny made me  teach English, God save those  I taught so far.