"My Experience with the Scarlet Letter" by Zsa’mine H

            Mr. Hall said choose a letter that would represent a sin to describe ourselves. When this project was given to me I thought it was funny, a joke, something just used to embarrass me around school, but as I began to further understand the novel “The Scarlet Letter” it made since to me. Instead of laughing I began to take it seriously. I finally understood the purpose in putting a letter on my clothing, and walking around with it. Although I wasn’t ashamed I had finally understood.

            Mr. Hall wanted us to relate to the main character Hester Prynne, he wanted us to relate a little more to the story as a whole. Throughout the novel Hawthorne focuses on the aspects of forgiveness and judgment. Although many people did not know what my letter stood for, there were often assumptions made, and due to those assumptions judgment was passed.

            The hardest part was figuring out what letter to use, because of course nobody wants to point out their flaws to the world, so I began to think. I wanted something that would be able to truly describe me, something about myself that I wasn’t entirely proud of, that would be my sin, and the letter on my chest would have that initial.

            It began with a story I was telling my mom, and throughout my story I kept referencing how irritated I was, and how angry I had gotten, and my mom just laughed. She simply said, “you’re always irritated, you get irritated off of crazy stuff.” I didn’t think about it because that’s something my mother always says, but when a boy in my class had said some of the same things my mom said I got to thinking. He said, “your letter should be ‘I’ for irritable.” It might have been a joke then, but the word stayed with me.

            So the next day I got to my task. I mad a very noticeable, and very colorful letter “I”, and pinned it to my shirt. It wasn’t humongous, but it was large enough for people to know that I wasn’t ashamed of the letter that I had placed upon myself. I embraced that letter as if it was apart of my own skin, because just like my skin it was a part of me. That simple, but very noticeable letter “I” represented me more than anything else had ever done.

            So when I was finally allowed to tell people what my letter stood for I was proud to say that the very noticeable, and very colorful letter “I” that was pinned to my shirt stood for irritable, and though I may have gotten judged for such a choice, I didn’t care. The letter “I” that had represented the word irritable began to represent me.