It's hard to trace back the exact moment when I fell in love with magic, as I feel it was rather a collection of moments out together that made me love magic the way I do. The first time I remember was in the second grade, when a student from a local high school stopped in, and showed our class some magic. Although the details are a bit foggy, I remember him doing the ambitious card, as well as the card to pocket. I was very impressed by his skill, but I still didn't really think of magic as an activity that just anyone could do. The second of the memorable experiences happened the next summer, when we went to a children's event magic show at our library. He performed several tricks, including the board suspension illusion, and a paintball routine. This combined with the performance of the highschooler earlier that year has left me thinking that magic was a neat thing to do, but I still didn't think that it was something for just your "ordinary" prople. Finally, another couple of months later, when school started again, my dad showed me the trick in which a card is chosen and then inserted into and retrived from the deck. I learned this trick with my family's deck of ten-year-old Hoyle playing cards that we used to play war with. Then, several weeks later, it was raining during recess, so we had to stay inside in the classroom. I'm that particular classroom, we had a bin full of packs of cards to play games with. I don't know what made me do it, but I grabbed one of these packs of cards, and approached my then teacher, and asked her if she wanted to see a magic trick. I then showed her this trick, this was the first time I ever performed magic for anyone. Now that I look back upon it, I realize that my break was just me holding the top part of the pack a good inch above the bottom part, and that my teacher's "amazing reaction" was just her making me feel good about myself when all I had just done was simply reveal the trick to her. I guess that that's just how things are. Then, the next year, I moved to my current home that year I preformed in my school talent show that year. It was terrible, I was hunched over my deck, mumbling "is this your card," and the trick ended up failing anyway, but my assistant was kind enough to lie and say, "yes," even though he knew as well as I that it wasn't. Over the next two years, I participated in the talent show again twice, and each time, my act became considerably better. Then, in the summer of two years ago, I received my first pack of bicycle cards, which was a huge improvement from my then-standard of 14 year old hoyles. Finally, the last part of my story, and quite possibly the part where I actually began to realize that I could actually one day consider being a magician as a career was when I discovered theory eleven, about a year ago from an ad card, and, by extension, when I won my first Saturday night contest, which also boosted my belief in the possibility of being a professional magician. So here I am, 5 years after my first discovery of magic at the age of 7. And in that time, I have come so very far from 2 inch breaks and hunched over mumbling. Magic has made me who I am. Although I have no idea where my life may take me from here, but no matter what happens, I hope and pray that It will never take magic away from me. Thank you all for your incredible support, and sorry for the long post, I just felt like I simply had to make It so long so that I could include every major step of my adventure. Magic means so much to me, and it felt wrong to leave out a single detail. Thank you for bearing with me as I went back over my personal journey in magic, and also k apologies for the poor quality of my writing, and grammar -I am only 12 years old, and not the best of writers. Thank you for, despite this fact reading this post of mine, and may all of your journeys in magic be prosperous and joyful.