My Experience In My Life

Everybody has a mountain to overcome and it's your choice whether you stay stuck in the valley or rise to the peak. An in my life I've had a mountain that not only I have overcome but, learned valuable lessons along the way. The crux of my struggle was the splitting of my parents which put me through some emotional instability. This, in hindsight, was the best for me as well as my parents but being young and selfish I seen it as my world splitting in half.

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.

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

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*

As I'm writing this, we have just returned from a 5 day hospital stay. Life has become a series of doctors' appointments, tests, and hospital stays. This is life with a chronic illness. . . especially one of which not much is known. But life wasn't always this way.

In life there are many obstacles a person will face, such as school, work, family and time.

During my first semester as an undergraduate college student, Santiago, my best friend and boyfriend, passed away. The flight from Denton to Dallas was not quick enough. Just as he took his last breath on the emergency room, the plane landed. At that moment, I had felt as if half of myself had died along with him. Life quickly forced me to encounter a difficult trial in my life; the death of a loved one is one that few learn to overcome. Death is a reality, hardly any truly know how to manage or if it is even manageable. Four years ago, at that exact moment, I had lost hope on dreaming. I refused to continue to dream since I felt it had led to nothing the first time. My dreams of one day spending the rest of my life with Santi had died along with him. At that moment I couldn’t see any dream ever coming true. However, just as life can throw us curve balls, it can also teach us how to aim for them and send them flying away.

The searing, stabbing feeling, vibrating through your skull that renders you completely to where you cannot move, talk, or even eat is what hit me on August 11, 2013. The day and night before my 15th birthday was spent in the ER with a crippling migraine. The feeling of being treated like there was nothing wrong with you, and you were just faking it must be the worst feeling I have ever felt in my life. Chronic migraines affect people differently and can cause so many different problems. This is when it all started, when it got better, and when it began to go downhill all over again.

Volunteering is an important part of my life, so Tulane’s emphasis on community engagement is one reason we’re a good fit. I actually had the opportunity to travel to New Orleans in the summer of 2016 through the Rustic Pathways organization to help rebuild the city from Hurricane Katrina. Even though I technically spent two weeks aiding others, the experience helped me more than I ever imagined it would. Not only did I immerse myself in the vibrant culture of New Orleans, but I learned firsthand about other lifestyles by meeting new people from all around the globe. We celebrated Bastille Day with Romane from Paris, and comforted her and Thomas when the Nice attack shook their nation. As we mudded the walls of ‘our house’ in the Lower 9th Ward, I shared stories about celebrity sightings with Emma from Rochester, and learned from Aidan that the stereotype of rain in Seattle is true. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to meet people who would become some of my closest friends while helping those that have been displaced. I was moved by the sense of connectedness that has emerged in New Orleans since the natural disaster. We worked with the Saint Bernard’s Project to bring families back home after ten years. The organization holds welcome home parties for the families once their house is finished, and our group attended the festivities for an older couple that had been living with their adult children since the disaster. Enjoying cake and conversing with the

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 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.

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.

Imagine your story becoming the forerunner of someone else’s. Someone you have never met, yet because of one story, he or she found the strength and courage to become a person far greater than ever imagined. A story of unimaginable adventures, lessons, and hardships, this is the story I, Thu Dang, will create for myself and others.

I was 16 when it happened. It was a surprisingly warm December day in 1994 in Bangladesh. It was already past dinnertime. My dad ran a little bit late from work, since so many people were out enjoying the nice weather. My dad owned a tailoring shop downtown, and it was always pretty busy, since most Bengali stores at the time didn’t sell stitched clothes. My mom and my three siblings went ahead and ate, but I waited for Dad to come home. We always ate dinner together, no matter how late he came back. When he finally came back, it was almost 9:00, so we decided that we were going to eat dinner while watching TV. We watched Looney Toons together. I asked him if he had any wacky customers at the shop. He jokingly tried to convince me to switch from pursuing biology to English. It was running gag between us. Anyone who knew me knew I sucked at English. After he finished eating, he got up to take his plate to the kitchen. I was finishing up my food when I heard a crash come from the kitchen. I ran to the kitchen and I saw my dad collapsed on the floor. I yelled for my mom. We quickly rushed him to the hospital. The quickest way to the hospital was by rickshaw. My mom, my brother, and I kept yelling at the rider to go faster. We finally got to the hospital only to realize that he was gone. He had died of an ischemic stroke on the way there.

One hour later, and my life became changed forever. My loving and caring family I bonded with would no longer be the same. The long walks with my mom in the evening would soon become a distant memory. Decorating for the holidays was just around the corner and I would have to hang up the stocking on the chimney without her. The sweet, rich, chocolate brownies she made every Friday night would leave my taste buds empty. Her hugs that made me feel loved when I was sad would now be a thought in my head, and our long talks about growing up and finding my way would be cut short.