My Experience In My Life

Sixteen years old can be a very confusing age in any person’s life. We’re expected to act like adults but get treated like children, the age we begin to prepare ourselves for our last year of high school, the year we start to look into colleges we want to attend and what it is we want to do with our lives. But for me it was the age when my parents thought they would lead separate lives.

My mind was buzzing. What had just happened? In the distance, I saw cars driving by completely unaware of what happened, how I felt. Disappointment, disbelief and fear filled my mind as I was crying hysterically from not knowing what had just happened in my life. I opened my eyes finding myself tilted on the passenger’s door. I didn’t know if I was sleeping and that I was stuck in this nightmare or if this was actually reality. I smelled the car’s engine. It was definitely reality. On June 27th, 2017, my life has been impacted greatly to what could have cost my mother and I’s life. The fault of this crash came from a 19-year old boy. He wasn’t concentrating on the roads. He should’ve stopped at the stop sign at the four way intersection. But he didn’t. He didn’t because he was high on drugs. That pretty much explains the reason of his fault. This accident gave me visual proof that God has a plan for everyone and everything has a reason or hidden message. You never know what can happen. Life is too precious to be taken for granted.

As I grow older and live new experiences, I realize how my childhood and God led me to the circumstance I am now, which is my last semester of nursing school. I come to appreciate my mother’s hard work to get me through school as well as through life. Growing up in a low-income family in Los Angeles, California with a dad who was a full-time alcoholic and drug addict, was not a good circumstance to grow up. My mother did not speak English or had a job and believed that a married woman is to fully depend on her husband. There were times when my 2 siblings and I had nothing to eat since my dad barely came home with money after spending it all on alcohol and drugs. Due to this living situation and the fact that I was the oldest child, I felt the strong responsibility to drop out of school once I was old enough to work. Education was not an option in my future. Since we didn’t have much money, my mom signed my siblings and me to free afterschool programs at my local Catholic church, so we could learn more about our religion and the importance of God in our lives. I remember my excitement to wake up early Sunday mornings to get ready for mass, even though it took 2 bus routes to get to church. I learned from nuns and priests the importance of caring for others as if they were my own family because everyone deserves the same type of care. Caring was something I learned through religion, and not something I was born knowing. As a way to start fresh, my dad decided to move us to

“Tough times don’t last, tough people do” - Julian Edelman. Throughout life I have overcome obstacles that seemed almost impossible to conquer. Crying, fighting, searching for a way out of my life that has haunted me for eighteen years. I thought I would never live to see this age, but here I am today, standing tall and proud amongst others everyday. The lessons I have learned and experiences I have gone through have built my character, gave meaning to my visits back home, and have helped me find ways to keep myself busy with free time.

The story began about a year and some months ago. Early in the Fall 2016 semester, I met a girl named Ann through a friend of mine. My first impression of Ann was that she was very pretty, but she talked a lot. I mean a lot! After I met her, the three of us began to hangout a couple of times each week. Even though she talked a lot it was fun having her around because of the energy she brought to any situation. At first, I felt that being around her drained my energy, but I eventually got accustomed to it, and grew to feed off it.

I first became aware of myself as a unique human being about a month ago because of things occuring in my life. I had a lot of new things going on in my mind last year for the first time. I didn’t know why it was this was happening to me, I thought there was something wrong with me. This is how I became aware of me being different from everyone else. *Personal*

I never imagine my life would turn into a routine after my emotional lost, but there it was. Working late nights throughout the week and going home straight from work became the norm. Most nights I ate whatever was quick and simple to make, and cried until the night engulfed me.

In my younger years, I was constantly reminded by my family, teachers and peers about the significance of spreading joy. I started to equate joy with making people smile. Inevitably, those childhood reminders and mindset helped manifest my adult aspirations. It has now become my aspiration to continuously experience joyous occasions when the beauty of genuine happiness is reflected through a confident, vivacious smile. However, growing up in Cameroon, I was not sure how this aspiration could be manifested into an actual profession. Upon moving to the United States, I had one of the most memorable experiences in an unexpected place, the dentist office; it awoke a hidden passion and desire in me. I never thought that sitting at a dentist office for over an hour would have such a great impact on my life. I never felt the stark confidence to allow joy to fully shine through my seemingly crooked smile, until my experience with Dr. Centty, the first dentist I ever encountered. She was very captivating and spoke in detail regarding brushing and maintaining a healthy smile. I was left astonished and felt a puzzling sense of joy and pride that I still feel until this day when Dr. Centty fixed my chipped tooth. It surprised me that a chipped tooth that made me self-conscious for over five years was taken care of so proficiently and gave me a reason to smile more often. Smiling may seem small, but a smile can change a person’s life. My smile changed that day and this childhood

It is not too long ago that I decided to become a pharmacist. I lived in South Korea most of my life. Back then, I had no idea what I wanted to be other than thinking about immigrate to the United States. I had chance to visit my uncle’s college graduation when I was a little boy and I only dreamed about living in the U.S ever afterward. For example, I decided to go to nursing school simply because there are more chances to move to the U.S as a nurse. The problem was I did not do well in terms of academic performance because I only thought about how to move to the U.S. Additionally, I admitted to hospital couple of times because of a pneumothorax so my gpa bottomed out.

As I boarded the charter bus to my second year of Unidiversity (an annual summer youth trip in Tennessee), I could not begin to imagine the person I would become as a result of this trip. As a teenager going into my last year of middle school, I was determined to have the time of my life. I wanted to have fun, make a better connection with friends, play games, laugh, and really enjoy the time with my leaders and friends. At this point in my life, I was hiding a dark secret that only two other people in my life knew about; I was bisexual. As an almost eighth grader, I was comfortable with my sexuality, but I didn’t know how to explain it to others, and although I knew my friends would accept me for who I was, something was holding me back. I would walk around hiding behind I mask that I thought was permanent, a mask that told everyone that I was one thing, when I was really another. Little did I know that I was about to rip off the mask, and show my true self for the first time in my life.

It’s hard to imagine what your life will be like, where it’ll take you, or what the future holds for you. If you told 13-year-old me that I was going to be on the path of 8 more years of schooling after high school, working towards a medical degree, I probably would have laughed and repeated the line that I have said so many times: “I’ll never become a doctor...that’s so gross”. At that age, my dream was to become a pastry-chef in a patisserie somewhere in the south of France, living life peacefully. I thought that I could never follow in my parents’ footsteps, sacrificing the best years of my life for the all-consuming difficulty and intensity of the pre-med track. And it is very intense. If you ever come across a pre-med student, they’re likely stumbling over the clutter of their biology textbooks and boundless research papers, frantically searching for the cure for some disease that no one can actually pronounce, all the while cramming for the MCAT that’s in 912 days because they have not yet memorized every bone in the human body. I’d like to dissociate myself from that stereotype. While most aspiring pre-med students were worrying about medical school acceptance rates, I was dreading my dad’s weekly case-study reading that he absolutely had to have my opinion on. Not to mention the countless visits I made to my mother’s work Christmas parties, where the nurses were constantly dressed in their scrubs, and I mean constantly, and the food unmistakably came straight from

Pflugerville, growing up in this town has been a unique experience not many others can say they had for themselves. Although I never tend to focus on the past, I still have seen this town grow to the extremity it is now today, in being one of the fastest growing areas in all of the United States. Many things you now see today like the new high school or the hospital which is being developed were not here when my I had first moved here. Reflecting back to my childhood, I find it to be inspiring- the experiences and knowledge I have gained throughout my life. Even if i had the chance to change things, I wouldn’t, I would do everything the exact same. My decisions may have not been the greatest at times, but they shaped me into what I am today. While there were many factors to lead me to how I am now, not all were as important as others. Growing up with a brother for example has been something in which words alone will not show how much I appreciate him. Also, growing up in the country has isolated me from a lot of things I sometimes wish I could take back, however the past is gone and the future in now. Many factors have shaped me into the person that I am today and I am grateful for each and everyone of them.

Have you ever wondered why amazing things happen to you? I have. To have something happen to you in a way that you cannot explain is kind of like a miracle. During my childhood, I experienced a series of events that really marked my life completely. Have I spoken to anyone about them? Yes, but I have not gone into details of these happenstances. The details, which I have not told anyone before, are the most important parts of this narrative since you will understand the significance of their correlations. They marked me completely and forever made me strong.

Maya Angelou once said, “What is the fear of living? It’s being preeminently of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility of yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don’t know what you’re here to do, then just do some good.” Everyday I think about everything I went through while growing up and forming into the person I am today. Going through all the experiences I have gone through, I didn’t realize how much they would impact me today and serve as lessons. Today I am a freshman in college. I did not think I would make it this far. The precious gift of life is to enjoy every moment as if it is your last.

My personal life has had many twists and turns that have shaped my life and my view on language as an individual. My life began growing up in a mixed family household: my mother being born in Jordan and moving to the United States when she was young, and my father who has lived in the United States. Growing up in a mixed household I only spoke English and I rarely heard any Arabic in my life. I would only know hear Arabic when I did something wrong or when we were spending time with my mother’s side of the family. While I was very influenced by Arabic culture I was not submerged in the culture so I did not understand all the complexities of Arabic culture in the US. If I grew up in a household where Arabic was spoken regularly (maybe not