We All Have Different Stories: Here’s Mine.

Everyone of us has a different story, we have had different obstacles to overcome and we will all have different successes. My difficulties haven’t been the same as yours and so my successes won’t be the same as yours either, and that’s okay. It’s very hard for me to remember that, and I have to remind myself of that everyday. I mean some of us struggle in math, while others struggle in English. Some of us deal with things outside of school like parents getting a divorce, or we’re struggling to get a job. Either way, we all struggle with something, and we will succeed in our own way. We have all changed in so many ways over the years and it’s quite incredible to see and think about. Every class I have, I look at all of my peers, I am amazed at how much some of us have changed and I like to think about how successful we all will be, I mean we are all going out to start new adventures. I’m not going to lie, it’s kind of scary to think about.  

I feel as though we can learn a lot from each other, we can mature and learn from our own mistakes and each others. I have had a lot of many different experiences throughout high school, that have made me into the person I am today. There was a point in my Sophomore year I started to question many things, like why is it that we feel the need to make someone else feel bad in order to make ourselves feel better? What was the point of anything, if one day you could be gone? There were two major things that made me question things; Uncle Steve dying and my friend Halee dying. On November 8, 2015 I woke up very early in the morning to 6 texts and 8 missed phone calls from my dad. I had spent the night at a friends house, so it was weird for my dad to be calling me at 5:00 in the morning. I called my dad back because I knew something was very wrong. When he answered he said, “Uncle Steve had a heart attack. I’m coming to get you,”. I just said okay, I honestly at first was like okay, so he had a heart attack, why do you have to come and get me, everything is fine. Well, I was wrong, when my dad picked me up he was crying and he told me that Uncle Steve didn’t make it. That first day was all a blur, actually the whole week was a blur. When someone dies, often times you’re not prepared for it, but you’re also not prepared for the aftermath of the person’s death. I had never seen my grandfather cry before, I had never seen most of the people that were crying cry. Even though I had been through a death before, I didn’t know how things were going to be, it helped to know some of the things that were going to happen. I knew some of the stuff that was going to happen because earlier in the year, on September 18, 2015 my friend Halee was killed in an accident, she was 18. We got the call the next morning, we were at the Litchfield Fairgrounds getting ready for the rodeo, when we got the call I couldn’t believe it. Halee was headed home from her dad’s to her mom’s, so she could got to bed early because we had a horse show the next day. Going to her funeral was horrible, I had been to funerals before, but this was different. I couldn’t understand how this could’ve happened, she was there right in front of me, yet she wasn’t. On top of dealing with these things, I developed an eating disorder. I went from weighing 145 pounds to weighing between 120 to 125 pounds. I could be perfectly fine eating one meal a day and my parents didn’t really notice. After these deaths, a lot of things are never going to be the same. Just when I thought that everything was sort of getting to what I’d call the new normal, my Aunt Michelle was diagnosed with Kidney Cancer.

Everything going on at home made it hard to come to school, made it hard to get work done. I mean all of us have struggled in school, but with all of this stuff happening so close together and so quickly, I got really behind in math. It made it extremely hard to pass geometry. I mean I’m sure all of us at one point or another has gotten behind in a class. I got so behind in math, that I had to stop working on Algebra 2 and finish Geometry, then I continued Algebra in the spring, it took my a year and a half to finish Algebra 2, but I finished it. I’m sure you’re trying to figure out why I have told you all of this, but I think it’s important for all of us to know each other’s stories and know each other’s struggles. We can learn from each other’s struggles and each other’s experiences. Passing any class let alone Math, which can be difficult on the easiest of days, was a major success for me and one that I’m proud of.

In the end, what does Graduation mean? Well, it’s up to you to define what graduation means to you. We have all gone through different experiences, but we have also shared a lot of experiences good and bad ones. I mean, we have been through the awkward phases, and we have watched each other blossom. Graduation for you, may mean that you have survived the mean girls, or you have passed FLIP. To me it means that I have done it, I have survived high school.  I have overcome many of my fears. I have passed math. I have made it through many different life problems, I should be a little bit prepared for the world, I hope. High School is so many things for different people, but I think we can all say it’s a time of big changes. In the coming weeks some of us will be going off to basic, buying stuff for our dorms, or starting new jobs, but we will all find our own way to deal with the real world. We are all starting this new adventure, some of us will struggle, but in the end after high school we all get a fresh start, it’s an adventure. I guess what I’m trying to say is, we are all going to go through different struggles, we can get through them, and we need to not judge others because we don’t know what they’re going through or what they’ve gone through. Everyone of us will have a different life story and different levels of success. With that, I would like to wish everyone the best of luck with this new adventure and good luck with all of your successes.

Photo by .Andi. on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND