Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 10 student in Cairns, Queensland, Australia.
My grandmother is not an easy person to describe, which is part of the point. She is a woman who says very little and means most of it. What she gave me was not warmth in any obvious sense — she did not praise effortlessly, did not explain herself and had a particular low tolerance for what she called ‘performing feelings’. What she gave me instead was an education in paying attention. Watching her, I learned to look at things carefully before speaking about them. She taught me this without intending to, which is the part I find most interesting now. The shaping she did on me was not instructional. She was not trying to pass anything on. She was simply herself, consistently, in a way that I found impossible to ignore. Her precision with words, her refusal to approximate or exaggerate, her discomfort with easy answers — all of this settled into me over years of proximity without my noticing. It was only when I began writing seriously that I realised how much of what I was reaching for was something I had first seen in her. What I do not fully understand yet is what it means to carry something from another person that you did not choose to receive. I am not like her in every way that matters. I am more prone to anxiety, less interested in silence, more willing to be wrong in public. But the part of me that refuses to use a word I do not mean, that finds approximation uncomfortable in a way I cannot quite explain — that part I can trace back to her with some certainty. What she cost me is harder to articulate. Her standard was not gentle. The version of myself I was before her influence was more comfortable with the approximate, more forgiving of my own imprecision. I am not sure I would choose to be that person again, but the choice was never really mine. She shaped me before I was old enough to consent to it, which is how most shaping works, I think. That is the thing I keep returning to: not whether it was good or bad but whether I would have chosen it, and what it means that I cannot know.