Does my essay use the correct amount of vocabulary and does it evoke emotion?
Describe a circumstance, obstacle or conflict in your life, and the skills and resources you used to resolve it. Did it change you? If so, how?
One month. One month of needles. One month of tears. One month of helplessness. One month of severe pain. One month of hospital. All it took was one month to change my view on my life. I went from an almost suicidal pessimistic girl scared of the future to a woman who was optimisticallywaiting for the future.
I know I am not exactly the most normal person. I also know that I get stared at from head to toe wherever I go. I was born premature and with cerebral palsy, which caused to me to walk with a limp. My inability to walk properly led to my negative and pessimistic view about the future. I grew up thinking I was a burden on my parents, and an embarrassment for my sisters though neither my parents nor my sisters ever said or did anything to make me feel such way. In fact, my parents would ask me to perform chores that would normally take a person 5 minutes to do but took me 30 minutes. It would irritate me, make me want to scream and cry remind them that I wasn’t the best person to be given such a chore, but my screaming and crying never stopped my parents from pushing me past what I thought was my boundary. My problem, though wasn’t my family, it was the outside world. I worried about what people thought of me and how they stared me down when they would see me walking. I learned to walk with down so I don’t notice the stares. It would embarrass me when I couldn’t walk fast enough to keep up with up with my friends. I would cry late at nights thinking about how I could play soccer or basketball because I couldn’t run. I was scared to face the future because I believed I would spend my life alone. I had grown to be a girl with low self-esteem, low confidence and frightened of the future.
My journey towards the new me started right when I walked through the hospital doors on the June of 2012. I saw people my age in wheelchairs and in all kinds of support system and it made me realize how lucky I was to at least be walking on my own two feet and not be dependable on my family for the smallest of acts, such as using the restroom or tying my shoelaces. However, the new me truly came after my surgery. I was part of a support group and part of the support group was a woman’s name, Amy. She was also born with cerebral palsy, except her condition was more severe and in addition to cerebral palsy, she had cancer. I knew her for two weeks and in those two weeks I never saw her sad or depressed. She always had a smile on her face and she was always looking to cheer on other people. She talked to us about her struggles and explained how it was her struggles the let her to connect with so many people. She would always force us to smile and would say “ You know you’ll change someone’s life with that smile today.” I know she changed my life with her smile. It was her optimism and positive attitude towards everything that made me realize how lucky I was to be living the life I was. May be it was the way she smiled or her passion to be change other people’s life, but something about her clicked in me. However, I look back today and I realize that it wasn’t only Amy and my family that helped me, it was me also. My resilience and desire to be a better person.
I don’t regret my bad days, because those days helped me be the person I am today. I have learned and understood the importance of hope. I can walk down the aisle at Walmart with my head up high because I know, it’s not my walk that defines but rather my personality and actions. I now know that my tears and my pessimism are not going to make the change in the world, I want to see, but my optimism and my smiles can make a bigger difference. I have grown in my self-esteem and my confidence and with this constant growth, I am ready to embrace the future.