My Experience In My Life

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.

Growing up I had a good life. I lived with my brother, sister, and both of my parents together as a good family. My parents really taught me how to be respectful and responsible. I was lucky to have them as good influences in my life. I am not one to disrespect anyone unless they have done me wrong. I grew up caring about school and always wanting to perform well and anything that I do. There were many challenges and events that helped me become the person I am today. One of which is when my family and I had the opportunity to visit our home country, Zimbabwe.

I was 6 years old when I got the news that me and my family were moving to Portugal for a few years. It was my first time on an airplane, my dad had recently got a job in Portugal and we all moved there to stay close to him because it would be a few years. I was having the best of times on that airplane and couldn’t wait to land in a different country, for the first time as well. I had an amazing childhood, we ended up staying five and a half years in Portugal. In these five and a half years, we were able to travel a lot inside Europe because it was practical and very cheap. We traveled throughout Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Greece, Austria, and Andorra. We even went to Morocco because it was very close to Portugal, and it was one of the best trips I ever had taken. After all of this, I fell in love with traveling.

“It’s Monday night, still haven’t come up with anything yet?” my daughter asks me as she comes into my bedroom. She finds me at my desk staring at my computer in a daze yet again. She knows I have been here for quite a while again today. The shreds of loose leaf paper on the floor that the dog has had a field day with are a dead giveaway. “Drink enough coke, mama?” she says laughing under her breath as she walks out of the room. I look over to see the three diet Dr. Pepper cans lined up in a row on my desk next to a plate that still has bits of the homemade fudge cake on it. “It’s true.” I think to myself. “Here it is last minute!”

Hello , Im Jamie i'm 18 years old and I want to travel the world when I get out of college but that but that seems almost impossible for me .

My life started like many American boy lives, easy childhood, fun adventures, and an affinity for cars. This charmed life was soon brought to a halt by the introduction to school. Previously the only social interactions were 30 minutes in the park or other gathering where my parents crossed paths with another couple with a child of similar age. This short meet and greet lead to some very weird situations, one that was most memorable encounters were with this 4-year-old, very thin girl at a library. At this particular library, there was a play structure where the parents could drop their kids so they could browse in peace. Having been dropped off, I was promptly greeted by a girl who said with a straight face, “I have a small ass which is good” which threw me off. Being 3 at the time made the situation even weirder. The other problem was at Three I was looking for the truths of the world so I accepted that a small ass was a good thing along with the other very suggestive things she said at 4-year-old. These truths stayed with me for a minimum of 3 years which includes my first year of school.

“Still there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I’ve slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”

Skrt Skrt! Dust blew through the air as Kiley and I sat in complete silence. Looking around in awe, I realized we finally settled somewhere other than the gravel road we started on.. Smashed and unrecognizable, the tahoe rested in the ditch next to my dad’s cornfield. What just happened? I vaguely remember my mom’s voice telling me in the past that parents set rules for a reason and although kids usually ignore not like them, they provide boundaries to ensure everyone's best interest. Cold and scared, I sat there shivering. I concluded that in this situation if I had listened to my mom, I believe I could have prevented this trouble. I saw my life at fourteen years old flash before me on November 19, 2016. This experience will live in my memory forever.

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

It was the last weekend of my summer vacation before entering senior year. All my life I have been spending my summer vacations in my beach house on Contadora Island, a small paradise off the coast of Panama. Everything on the island is joy and serenity. It had almost become a tradition for all the island residents to go spend the last weekend there. I had a very close friend who also had a house in Contadora. He was the most caring and gentle person I have ever met. I would regard him as an example of how people should treat others. He was always so considerate and friendly with everyone, no matter what. These were qualities that I did not see in myself at the time. Whenever I had the opportunity, I would criticize someone for not being or looking a certain way. Or I would not treat people with the corresponded respect they deserved. These were all things that Walter would try to change in me, with his caring and humble personality, but my arrogance would keep persisting. When it came to the formation of his professional self in academics, he always strived for more. He was the most ambitious, while I was a conformist with mediocre results. Coming back to this particular weekend, Walter had opted to spend it camping at a reservoir with another group of friends. The weekend on the island was very fun, even though he had not come. I woke up early on Sunday, it was February 28, 2016. Little did I know that this day would mark the rest of my days. I woke up early to enjoy my

My life, or perhaps in the manner that I perceive it, has been overwhelmingly filled with enlightening and repressive circumstances that could have been averted, but all in all, makes up one's destiny. These events intricately tailored me into a young man that grew conscientious of the detrimental behavior of “acting before thinking” and into the realm of “thinking before acting". What I would soon come to understand was that through sheer patience, and trial-and-error it instilled within me new insights to learn from and that the most triumphant moments in my life began at the crossroads of unknowingness, a decision to stay in mediocrity, or the pursuit towards personal greatness- thus the decision had to be met.

Ten years ago, I was officially a college dropout; leaving Wiley College after only two years was the biggest mistake of my life. Ten years ago, I created a narrative about the type of people who went to college. I made myself believe that college was a place exclusively for extremely smart people who came from nice middle-class families. College was not a place where an African American who lived in subsidized housing went. Although I was enrolled in college and doing quite well, I fell victim to self-doubt and ultimately believed that I did not have the ability to graduate. Consequently, after only two years, I dropped out of college.

My life is full of adventures here in El Paso, where I was born and raised. A city like this is unique and different from many other cities because our city is right next to the border to Juarez Mexico, meaning the culture here can differ greatly. The city is unique and special, mainly because of the very Hispanic culture here that has taught me to love my family. The environment here that I have been raised in is based on a great deal of religion, family, and challenging work. I believe the environment I was raised in has matured me to be a hard-working brother and a student.

When I look at how different our lives were five months ago so many things run through my mind, “What could we have done differently?” “What could I have done differently?” The week of finals before the end of my junior year I wondered if bad things really do happen to good people, or if good people do bad things that put them into bad places.