<p>If this is to exccessive, how exactly should I tone it down, and don't judge.</p>
<p>Before the age of 20 I have moved 9 times, spanning across 6 states and have seen every one of my friends disappear while witnessing my family be driven apart. At the age of 7 I was homeschooled while I should have been in 1st grade. When returning back to school in 2nd grade after moving to Yorktown, Virginia, I took a test to see if I still qualified for my grade and was moved up into 3rd grade due to that score. That year I also started to gain this obsession with novels, especially with authors such as John Grisham and Chuck Palahniuk and still today I still seem to have an odd obsession with novels. Anyways shortly after my stint in Yorktown I moved to a town named Lindale that is here in east Texas which I was placed in Gifted and Talented which I remained in over the next 3 years from 3rd grade to 6th grade. In 5th grade we moved to Olympia, Washington, there my mother was diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia and was placed in a hospital for half a year before returning home. In the year of 2004 we moved to the town of Mansfield which lies in the Metroplex here in Texas. There I became friends with a Vietnamese boy named Stephen, over time young Stephen and I became best friends and I considered him my first real friend that I had up to that point in my life. During the end of 2004 Stephen became very sick and had an outbreak of seizures. After visiting the hospital it was declared that young Stephen had an inoperable brain tumor in his left frontal lobe. Stephen died shortly after that at the age of 12. I was a pallbearer at Stephens funeral where his family and I buried Stephen into his grave.
Shortly following his death, I moved to a town in southern Colorado named Pueblo West. In Pueblo West while I was at the age of 13, my older sister Michelle who was 17 had gotten in her first serious relationship. My father had never liked her boyfriend and always considered him to be a bit on the evil side. Five months into their relationship my father told my sister that she would not be allowed to stay with us if she continued to date her boyfriend. So Michelle made a decision, and that decision was to move out of the house and in with her boyfriend. My family and I rarely spoke to Michelle after that. After about 4 months in the summer of 2006 when I was 14 years old, we received word that Michelle had been in an accident, it turned out that her boyfriend had broken up with her and she had nowhere to go. My sister had committed suicide; she had driven her car into a river in Colorado Springs, Colorado. My sister Michelle died at 18 years old, and again I was a pallbearer as I buried my sister into the ground.
Six months afterword we moved to the town of St. Michael which lies outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This is where I began high school after leaving my friends behind in Colorado to never see them again. Midway through my freshman year my parents had began to become unsettled with each other, maybe over the death of my sister or the constant movement that had never let our family have a true home. My mother divorced my father at the end of my freshman year and went off to live in Petrolia, Texas, which lies in the northern part of Texas near Wichita Falls. This is where my mothers parents lived and where she had lived her entire childhood. My mother strongly tried to convince me to move off with her and to leave my father behind in Minneapolis. There I was put with the choice to either leave my father, or to leave my mother. I chose to go with my mother, who was forced to go alone if I had not gone with her. My youngest sister Katie decided to stay with my father in Minneapolis, while my mother and I drove 1000 miles to the northern tip of Texas. There I began my sophomore year in a rural town of Petrolia, Texas that had a population of roughly 800 people. There I excelled in academics and athletics, which academics had always been very important, not because of my parents encouragement but it was the only thing I found that would always be there for me, and as something I could always find truth in. In Petrolia, I found security, found security with my mother and my grandparents and finally felt that I belonged to something, that I had finally found a place that I could call home. I continued to achieve highly in school, receiving commended on all of my standardized state test scores. During the beginning of my junior year, Petrolia forced our entire class to take an ASVAB test; much of my classmates lacked chance after high school unless they turned to the military. When the results of test were given out, I received a 96 on the ASVAB test. This score turned out to be the record high for not only the school, but for the entire district that I was in. During Christmas time of my sophomore year, my father came to visit my mother and I. In my fathers visit, he explained to us that he was offered a job in Waxahachie, Texas and my mother and father spoke together but with a spark that I had not seen with my parents since I was a child. After about a month, my mother told me that her and my father had decided to get re-married and were moving back in together in Waxahachie, and that I stuck without a choice but to move back in with them. All this sounds great, but with another town behind me, in a town that I finally felt my sense of purpose, my feelings were left unnoticed and I was left with sheer bitterness towards my family. After much debate with my parents, and with the kindness of my grandparents, I had decided to stay with my grandparents. I parted ways with my family, and worked for my grandfather who was a local mechanic in the neighboring town of Henrietta, Texas.
Due to my grandparents low income, which my grandfather only made around $20,000 a year and was at the age of 70, they could not afford to have me stay with them any longer. So during the summer of my junior year, I moved back with my parents. My father and mother now had a feeling of bitterness towards me, as I did with them and we were very distant during my senior year where I went to Waxahachie High School. I floated along that year not feeling a sense of belonging, but when it came time to take SATs I went in and scored an 1865, which turned out to be one of the highest of my high school class that had around 350 students. I had the opportunity my freshman year of college to go to the University of Texas at Arlington where I would have received an 8,000 dollar scholarship but when I spread the word to my father, he refused to pay the rest of my tuition, and said he would only pay my tuition if I went to a local junior college, which was Navarro College. After a year of college at Navarro while living with my parents, my father was offered a job in Phoenix, Arizona. My father took the offer and in the summer of 2011 my family once again moved across the country. Being aware of the move I applied to the University of Arizona, where I was accepted into their business program. When I received the acceptance I showed my father, but was turned down for any financial assistance that I assumed he may provide. My father wanted me to start working for his company, as a low-paid factory worker that could eventually move up. I was completely appalled by the offer but my father refused to continue paying for my schooling, so I gave myself the choice. Shall I become a 19 year old factory worker, or should I again part ways with my parents but finally for good. Knowing the burden of paying four years of financial aid at a university, I applied to Blinn College in Bryan, Texas and was accepted. I applied for financial aid, which I received the small award of $1800 a semester, and having been forced with this decision so late into the summer I had no time to apply for scholarships for the upcoming year. I drove alone at the end of August of last year, 1,000 miles to College Station, Texas to the apartment that I could barely afford.
This is where I currently live now; I attend Blinn College and work as a Teller for Wells Fargo. After this semester I will run out of core credit hours and will be stuck with taking classes that pertain to my Accounting major that I have planned to take at a university.<br>
Everything in my life I carry with me, every person Ive met, and every friend that I have lost will always stay with me and affect every way that I choose to look at things from every possible angle.
Everything that you will ever in life do will be because of you. You can have heroes and you can have people that you look up to, but in the end you need to look up to yourself and let you decide what is truly right for yourself and accept the responsibility of everything that will ever be done.
Now this isnt intended to be something to look at and pity, dont view this as me going out of my way to try to make you feel sorry for me. Im attempting to try to show that the word diversity means more than the definition of diversity to me, and that goals and pursuits of dreams are not just things that I aspire to, they are everything that I am.</p>