Consent

I have a love-hate relationship with the English Language. It is the language I teach and the medium I use in creative writing. I love the sound of it and the flexibility of its words. 

However, the language was used as a tool against me for almost twenty years. In spite of my carefulness with grammar, many so-called English Language experts described me as an incompetent user and teacher of the language(perhaps my bad stutter), not because they were better than me but it was their warped sense of grammar that had clouded their mind's eye from what is acceptable(I copied verbatim a quote by Thomas Hardy on a whiteboard and some teachers remarked that it was riddled with errors). The really good ones won't be snooping around detecting your errors. It is the half-baked ones who like to pinpoint your non-existent errors( a boy was asked to jot down the frequency of my alleged wrong grammar usage). 

Now that a new chapter of my life has begun. I found myself looking at things differently and if I were to face the same ordeal again I would not give them a chance to torment me.
  

No one can belittle you without your consent. ' Eleanor Roosevelt.

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