Personal Narrative: You Re Busted !

Having grown up in a time and within a society where the terms fail and lose are rarely spoken to children in any aspect of their lives, I generally considered myself a success in everything I did. I received medals, ribbons, certificates, awards, and trophies for academics, sports, and for just being a kid. So in my mind, for the majority of my life, I was unaware that I had failed or lost at anything. And having a father that is a U.S. Marine, failing and losing were not things that I wanted to tell him that I had done. Now that I am tasked to determine how I have grown from my failures, I realize that I have failed, that failure is not the end, and that I have excelled in several areas of my life due to what I have learned from those failures.

My tough decision was to choose only one sport to play to either baseball or play soccer. I was not that good at soccer, but I was better at baseball. The rest of my family played baseball or softball. My options were to to either stick with playing baseball or soccer. The consequence was to play soccer and not be as good as I was in baseball. The final process was to make a decision on what sport I should primary play. The decision I decided to play or stick with was baseball.

Put the gun down! Put the gun down! Pow Pow Pow. The gun shots cracked into the air as loud as thunder. One after another. We live day by day not knowing our end. In the blink of an eye our lives can be changed forever. Its life, yet even in knowing this we never expect tragedy to find us. We never expect it to affect our lives and the people we know and love. I’m going to share with you the day tragedy found my life.

As I stood on the outside of the arena watching teen girls traditional finish dancing, my stomach filled with butterflies. I walked into the arena as the announcer says “Next up teen girl's jingle,” with all the other dancers in my category. It was Sunday, the last day of Indian Summer Pow Wow, and my last contest for this pow wow, this year. Although I was nervous, I was also filled with happiness, confidence, and gratefulness. “Take it away boys” the announcer says. That’s when I knew that the drum group was going to start playing and this meant I had to start dancing.

Okay. Now back to the present. I sat up and walked around. I was on a hotel room bed. There was a desk on the right of the bed. On the desk was a laptop. It was a X3S90. The X3S90 laptop is made to look like a briefcase. There was a laptop bag next to the desk(I don’t know why). There is also a black backpack. I assumed it was mine. On my right, there was the bathroom, a closet and the door. There was also a big refrigerator next to the closet

It was record breaking temperatures on this July 4th day. Red, white, and blue filling up the stands. Fans and umbrellas protecting spectators from the heat of the sun. It was about game time and I was getting ready to take the field for the last home game. Butterflies in my stomach, but I had to tell myself “it’s just another game”. Even though in my heart I knew it was not just another game.

I chose to take AP Biology in my sophomore year of high school, which I quickly learned was a very demanding course. Even the instructor agreed there was too much material to cover before the AP test. This meant that we flew through each unit, and had very few opportunities to earn extra credit.

Last place. 6th out of 6. Failure. Loser. All things you never want to see or hear. When I saw my name at the bottom of that sheet my heart dropped. I was at a figure skating competition, and after competing I didn’t feel great about my performance but I didn’t feel horrible. I had fallen on 1 of my jumps and messed up a little bit in my footwork but my far my spins were the hardest and I executed them nicely. Overall it wasn’t an awful program. Besides all of the other girls had fallen on the same jump I did. About 20 minutes later, this girl walks over to the wall with a clipboard, removes a piece of paper from the top, and tapes it to the wall. I knew it was my group so I walked over to check, my heart beating faster than ever. I looked

I quickly woke up to the sounds of loud sirens, I have no idea what is going on as I try to regaining my position. I'm noticing my hands are cuffed as I start to quickly realize what is going on. I start to frantically panic as my eyes finally adjust to my surroundings. I see that I'm clearly in the back of a cop car. I observed that the police officer is seeing that he is periodically looking in the rear view mirror then back to the road. I irrationally start to spit out nonsense before I solidly ask him in a shaky voice, “w-w-whats going on, why am I in here?” He looks back at me, giving out a quick chuckle, “oh you clearly know what you did darling, don't act innocent.” I then reply back, quickly giving him a confused stare “n-no

Being able to keep an open mind even in the face of something that is completely new to you is a difficult feat to accomplish for some, including myself. I am a naturally curious person, but also come from a town where there is not much diversity so any sort of deviation from the “norm” has always piqued my interest. One of the most enlightening experiences I have had was as a student in high school when I joined the gay straight alliance club and one of the guests they brought in was transexual. This was the first time I had been exposed to someone who identified in that category and I was interested and unsure of how I would react to meeting this person.

At a young age, I moved from the country I was born in (Dominican Republic) to Miami Florida. Moving is not an easy thing to do, I had to leave all of my friends and family behind and become familiarized with uncertain place. I was surrounded by the unknown, everything was strange and so different to what I was usually use to. At the time I could not speak any English at all but that eventually did not matter to me, I slowly started adapting to my new environment and I became more positive. Although I could not communicate well and had a few obstacles I was very organized with my studies and kept very decent grades.

Bare with me for another blog post about volleyball. This weekend was the Badger Region Volleyball Tournament, which my team participated in. When I walked into the building, the memories flooded in with scenes from the elevator adventures, cheese fries, and design your own sweatshirts. The first day, my team didn't play up our full potential, with my team only winning one out of three matches; which meant that we didn't place in any of the brackets, meaning zero chance of receiving a medal. However, at the end of the second match, I got switched from being middle all-around to libero ( a position where you only play back row on offense and defense). I guess it's an honor, but it puts a lot of pressure on me by labeling me as the best passer

One of the greatest life skills that you can attain is to always double check! I unfortunately had to learn this lesson the hard way. Even though obstacles come up, you can always learn from them. In this certain situation, my brother David and I thought that we did something when in reality we didn't.

Get me out of here. I know something is about to happen, I feel it in my gut. It's a setup for failure, really. A party at an estranged house on the edge of the city full of nothing but intoxicated and incapacitated teens. Something is bound to go down. I started to think of ways to get out without just bluntly saying it.

Mistakes happen for them to be lessons, which I found that out in 2016 when I was at Anna Dirksen’s house. At the time we were really bored so we walked outside. As we were outside, we both saw her four-wheeler. Anna spoke while we were staring at her four-wheeler, “Wanna get on?”. “Sure” I answered.