My Eraser - Free Blog

“Okay. Pack all your clothing and the necessities, we’ll leave next week.”

So that’s what I did.

Like that we were moving to Miami. I asked my nine-year-old self, “what do I even bring?” So I packed up all of my clothes which left me with one box to shove my “prized possessions” into. What even were those at the time? Well, I created a checklist in my head of the things that I really needed and thought would benefit me the most. Of course, my oversized pencil case was what came to mind. At the time, we fourth graders were very into collecting sparkly and colored pens which we'd flex in class and sometimes trade with each other if we were daring enough.

As soon as we arrived in Miami I had to be thrown into school mid-year. At this point, you can imagine how chuffed I felt having packed thoughtfully with my pencil case with me ready to go. Why am I telling you this? Well, because what comes from this story is this interesting fact: to this day I still use my eraser from that very pencil pouch that I brought with me from South Africa in fourth grade.

I find it very interesting when I hold the eraser and examine it, thinking of how its a physical connection to the past and my previous life back home. At the same time, it’s an archetypal symbol of life changes over time and the few consistencies that ground me over the years, providing stability.

When I look at it in my hand with my fingers clasped around the edges I imagine my little nine-year-old baby fingers clutching onto it. What was I like then? How am I now? What is the same and what is different? These are questions I often spend time thinking about. Other than my life being entirely different back then, in South Africa, compared to now, I wonder how I as Yakira was different. For example, back then, the things that I erased didn’t mean that much to me, however, I still erased them because I wanted my work to be quality. After moving to America, I erased things for a different reason. The competitive schooling system pushed me to seek perfection in everything I did. I wasn’t pleasing myself, I was preparing for my future.

On the other end of the spectrum, I think of all the things that it has erased. The mistakes while learning fractions in grade five or the misspelling of the word “onomatopoeia” during sixth-grade English. Then today, when I used it while doing my Microeconomics homework. From the foundational years of my education to collegiate work preparing me to earn my degree and enter the business world, my eraser has been present and partaken in the experience of my learning. Although my life has changed every year, the eraser still serves a purpose. It helps me through my education, serving as a tool to recognize my errors and correct them. That’s one of the main indications of learning, being able to identify flaws and knowing how to address them. Because my education gets increasingly more complex as I proceed through my schooling, does that mean that the things I am erasing are increasingly important? Rather than looking at it that way, I like to believe that it has nothing to do with that at all. I think the reason that I still use my fourth-grade eraser is to remind me about how trivial some things I stress over really are. Things might be of higher stakes now that I’m in college, but if I think back the nine-year-old me I remember how little weight these things had on my uninhibited mind. Thinking of how carefree I used to back then grounds me and helps me realize that things are ok.

While I am not able to erase life mistakes and I have to be more cautious about the long-lasting effects that negative decisions can cause, I can re-evaluate these mistakes in the grand scheme of things. I can analyze them to see how they reflect who I am as a person. If those mistakes were in line with my character and I can still find traces of my younger self in my thought process leading up to them, then was it a mistake at all?