Personal Narrative: How I Ended Up Where I Am

We should all be familiar with that feeling you get right after you do something that you know was going to either get you hurt, or in trouble. I find I normally find myself asking the question “How did I get here?” very frequently when I’m with my best friend, Tarren.

There were many people in my life that got me to who I am today. My family and friends were the main people that influenced who I am. There were many events that influenced me but the most recent one is picking early college.

I was born on September 28, 2015. Born into the arms of a beautiful mother and loving father. They were both young and had little money, but they did their best to raise a little girl. They worked hours and hours, always came home exhausted, but they always made time and squeezed out the energy to spend time with me and remind me I was the most important thing to them. My sister came three years later and then my brother four years after that. I don't remeber much of my childhood, I just knew I was happy as toddler through the pictures they captured.

My father named me after the Laurel flower that grows on the mountains. I was almost named Alexandra, but it’s my middle name instead. My mom didn’t let my father name me Alexandra because she didn’t want people calling me Alex, and so my father chose Laurel. My mom’s name is Christine, and she always hated when people called her Chris. My last name, Kirby, is well known in our tiny town. I grew up in one of the smallest towns in Maine, Arundel, which is so small in fact that it’s not featured on maps of Maine, and doesn’t even qualify as a town large enough to get its own zip code. So, in this tiny town I grew up in, everyone knew

On paper, my life may appear to be an average, uneventful life with no real experiences to shape who I am as a person. However, I can firmly say that while I may still be young, high school has taught me many life lessons and helped form me to be who I am today. High school has been a series of highs and lows, with many successes and some failures. Before I reached high school, failure was a foreign concept to me, I had never truly experienced what it meant to not succeed at something in the first attempt. This was a hard lesson for me to learn and accept, but I can now see late in my senior year that these failures helped me grow into who I am today. Along with the growth brought on by failure, I also began to treasure my successes more, and feel a sense of accomplishment in my achievements.

As a child who has grown up moving around several times, I believe it has shaped me to find out who I am. It has encouraged myself to find out who I am and try new things. When I was younger I was extremely reserved but meeting new people as I moved schools forced me to branch out and become the individual I am today. One of my strongest passions is succeeding, but to succeed I've come to realize you have to fail. As a typical child figuring out what I love to do, I trial and error with almost every sport you could think of soccer, basketball, softball, gymnastics. In middle school I was in sports and also band, but I came to realize academics is one of the things I love to succeed in the most, it gives me a rush of happiness when I'm doing

Throughout my life, I have pushed myself to be involved in my community which has shaped me into who I am today. Freshman year, I went with a group of kids from my church to a homeless maternal shelter in a downtown suburb. It was Valentine’s Day, and as I walked through those gray halls lined with rooms, void except for a bed, blankets, and a crib, there was a sense of love underlying the visible emptiness. Coming together as one, families were united in the knowledge that sometimes the only way to keep going is to give all of who you are to someone else. As middle schoolers, love for us was quantified by the amount of Valentines cards you got on your desk. However, after seeing clearly through the eyes of women who had experienced its trials,

I fill many roles in my life, including but not limited to, brother, son, friend, and student. I strive to be the best at each of these roles as I can be, but at the same time remain true to my character. On my snowman, I have drawn images such as a basketball, a globe, and a taco. These are just a few things that I feel describe who I am. I am always doing my best to be who I am and not who others want me to see. As Shia Labeouf once said, “Your life is your life. Know it while you have it. You are marvelous.” Despite yelling things such as “Just do it!” in a similar video, Mr. Labeouf still manages to get a strong point across. I try to live by these principles, and know my life while I have it, and whenever I am feeling self-conscious, remember

When i was looking at my transcript and remembering the courses and the teachers, i found out that my transcript say a lot about who i am. It mainly reflects how i think.

The environment around me has molded me into the man I am today together with its strenuous experiences and jubilant moments. In addition, those memories have created a blazing ambition to become a more intellectual and compassionate individual. Next, my community and certain individual have thought many fundamental aspects that completely changed on how to view this world today. For instance when I study martial arts under Sensei Deanna Bivins, she trained me to become more self disciplined no matter the path that lies before me. Furthermore, the number one person that has carefully raised and taught me almost everything I know is my father. My father has educated me around one concept “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want others do unto you” and because the golden rule was always so close to my heart, I have always grasped the idea of being kind to others. Similarly, I think being involved in my community not only

I was born and raised in Iran, and left to US when I was 26 not knowing a soul here. Back in Iran, the social and conventional context of country wouldn’t expect and accept unpredicted traits from young females such as living alone or solo traveling. Therefore, I used to be the one that my loved ones were always concerned about. My adventures began immediately after I moved out of my parents’ to live alone at 17. To me, I was challenging the status quo to live an authentic life. But, others called me “stubborn” and considered my solo travels as “wrong” or “stupid”. As a result all the spontaneous road trips and serendipitous friendships remained my little secret stories of years lived in Tehran. Finishing school and starting a career enabled

One... Two... Three... Four... Five... I take a deep breath. It's the only thing I can do to keep myself from screaming. I'm looking at one of my co-drum majors, and he's staring at me with his eyebrows raised. A freshman waits to the side of us, hands on her hips as she waits for us to get our lives together. When I told her she needed to safety pin her shirt together to adhere to the dress code, he had loudly professed that I was just being overdramatic and she didn't really need to listen to me. I pulled him aside, and our argument continued in a similar fashion. Fast forward five minutes, and I eventually told her she could go but needed to wear a more appropriate to the next night's band practice. He had won, but he didn't understand

I’m sure I am the “ole guy” in the group at the age of 57 years old. I can hear what you are thinking, this guy is older than my parents. I first started college in 1977. It was fairly short lived and un-eventful, my priorities were not in place and as a result I dropped out. Contrary to what you have just read, I have always been a positive, goal oriented person, college just wasn’t that goal at the time.

One of my failures that I experienced which can be indispensable for later success is letting both my severe depression and severe anxiety interfere when it came to any as well as everything. To a certain extent, I gave up an infinity of times without a doubt, extremely regretting it. Recently, I decided to stay single until I’m completely done with my education, thereupon not only can I focus on school, while I can focus on myself in order to be successful in life. It bothers me horribly considering it is difficult to focus without over thinking.People contemplate that I’m just making everything up in order to get out of it when in reality my mental illnesses, making it harder to participate in presentations, work in class, etc. Nobody gets

Probably not the first thought I that should’ve run through my mind while I was dangling 1,000 feet in the air off of the side of a mountain. But then again, I already knew how I got up there: as a novice, I was climbing a challenging, inclined trail with the hopes that my beat-up Chuck Taylor’s would support me the whole way up. Unfortunately, the Chucks let me down and one wrong step on a particularly steep incline landed me holding onto a metal bar holding on by whatever little grip strength my fingers could muster. the crisp mountain air gently rocking me back and forth, the lush foliage of the trees below me shivering in a feverish anticipation of what was to happen next. Up there I was afraid, probably more