Growing up my family and I would always attend Hindu Indian functions on religious days. Usually, the adults would pray inside the hall while the kids would play outside. When I was a kid, I would love these events, and I would look forward to them for weeks. However, matters began to change as I entered my teen years.
My friends and I had become bored at these function, it and was no longer entertaining to play outside. At one particular function, we decided to take one our parents’ mini-vans to go and get Taco Bell. We all had our licenses, but our parents had still told us to not go out. Despite this, we decided to go against our parents, and we drove off. We went through the drive-thru and everything was going smoothly. Then, the tides turned. I, mistakenly, switched lanes without checking my blind spot, and I hit the SUV in the next lane. This whole situation had turned into our worst nightmares. Luckily, it was just a minor fender-bender. However, the scariest part of this situation was calling our parents and informing them of this. When I called my parents, they didn’t sound too angry at first, but I guess they were just in shock. After they arrived at the scene of the accident and had checked that everyone was okay, the anger emerged.
They gave me this comprehensive lecture on how what we had done was stupid and how dangerous it was. It was extremely embarrassing because it occurred in front of my friends and their parents. At first, I wasn’t too interested in what they had to say, because, in my mind, it was just a little mistake. Then, it hit me. I had realized that they were only upset because they loved me and didn’t want anything terrible to happen to me. At this point, I had felt as if I had lost my parents’ trust. I had been scolded before, but I had done nothing of this magnitude before in my life. I had never been suspended or even received detention at school. This was a new low for me, and I felt that I had to do something to regain respect and make my parents proud of me.
For me, this failure has significantly helped in life. After this situation, I gained a newfound appreciation for my parents and the guidelines they have set for me. In addition, I have attempted to exhibit a higher focus on my education to show my parents that I was serious about my future. My parents are middle-class, blue-collar workers who immigrated to the United States to escape poverty and provide a better future for their children. This accident gave me a wake-up call, and my new goal in life is to make my parents forever proud. I would do anything for them to feel that coming to the United States was the right move and that they had raised a successful and productive member of society.
All in all, while the short-term impact of this event was negative, the long-term influence continues to serve me well. The saying, “The lord works in mysterious ways” definitely proved to be genuinely true for me. In conclusion, to me all failures, if approached in the right way, can have a positive influence in the long run, and my experience would certainly fit under this category.