Reflection Paper

After a long ride, we saw our new home for the first time. It wasn’t luxurious, but to a couple of young children like us it was cool to live on the beach. The changes that lied ahead of us were great. There are many ways in which this new start changed my life. First, no longer did we live in fear. This enabled me to move on. I enrolled in eight grade that year. I felt like had a fresh start. No one knew my business. I could make myself whatever I wanted. My whole personality changed. That year I started at quarterback for junior high and from there everything started to look up. If I was to go into details of all the success I had it would be bragging, so I am just going to say I went from a casualty of a broken home to a respected and important part of High Island High School. In the five years I was there, I had more fun and a more productive life than all the other years put together.

On September 6, 2017, I were documented for an incident that involved a University Housing policy violation. I was charged with violating the University Housing Alcohol 1.2 policy. With my violation, came consequences. I met with The Residence Conduct Coordinator to discuss my actions and came to the conclusion that I would have to schedule a meeting with The Campus Alcohol and Drug Education Center (CADEC) and with that, a reflection paper.

“My childhood was happy and pleasantly uneventful. I was the youngest child by 11 years and grew up in a middle class family with loving parents and sisters. I was a good student, a strong athlete and a happy and well­-adjusted child. Somewhere in the middle of Grade 6, however, my safe and simple childhood world began to unravel – and I didn't know how to react.

As you grow up, your interest change, your friends change, and you as a person change. Living thousands of miles away from my cousins made me change.

Pictures are worth a thousand words, something the average person has heard many times. When looking at a picture, we can easily describe what we think is happening, what we see, and what the people must be like, but do we really know? When we grow up and take the time to look at old pictures and reminisce the good ‘ole days, many times we’re shocked as to what we looked like, who we were friends with, and it takes us back. Looking back at pictures from the toddler days are almost always amusing, but the middle school days? Yikes! Who knew neon pink was so not my color?! Another change would be relationships and bonds, they don’t always last forever. You can’t be the same person you were in your past, life happens and you change.

I have been playing soccer since I was five years old.  As a girl who didn’t have a lot of self-confidence, my ability to play this game well gave me a lot of positive attention.  I made friends and loved the feeling of being part of a team.  The soccer field became the one place I felt the most confident.

We are all different in unique ways that make us who we are. Life comes in all shapes, sizes, colors, and orientations, and yet the only thing we, as a society, see is what makes up the best of these. So many people believe that being “different” is not acceptable in the world, and because of this, people deny themselves who they are and live in fear. I sadly found myself in the same situation, afraid and alone.

Stubborn is how my Mom would describe my personality. My Dad, on the other hand, always said I was tenacious. He believed our greatest strength can be found by understanding our weaknesses. As a child, he explained that being stubborn is a negative attribute. According to him, people do not like when they meet an inflexible brick wall. Tenacity, on the other hand, can be a powerful tool. It shows people you are determined and persistent. He wanted me to understand that a strength can sometimes be a weakness made to work in our favor. I have always remembered this advice and have used tenacity to achieve many of my life goals.

I am a privileged person. I am white. I am upper-middle class. I am university educated. I am thin. I have parents who are still married to each other. I have always had some form of part time work since starting high school. I have no student debt. I am straight. I am Christian. I am an extrovert. I have a strong voice and an even stronger opinion. This made a class on inequality difficult to relate to but if anything, its shown that I do not have even the most basic understanding of what some of my less privileged peers go through everyday. Because of my privilege and powerful voice, I found it extremely difficult to express my opinions in this class because I either felt like a hypocrite or I felt domineering thus I took a silent position attempting to not only understand how some of my peers feel but also because I had never understood what it was like to be unable to share my individual opinions and stories. Although the silence was unintentional, as I went through reading my classmates posts I found myself frustrated because of something I differed in opinion on or because I felt that a grouping to which I belonged was being misrepresented and there was nothing I could do to address the situation.

The Medieval Era was a time dominated by belief. People lived with such great superstition and fear of God. Many people were focused not on their lives her on earth, but rather their life after death. During the Renaissance people became more humanistic and focused more on their lives in the moment rather than their afterlife. We can see these changes of Ideas by studying the works of Saint Anselm of Canterbury, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Thomas a Kempis, and Caesarius of Heisterbach from the Medieval Era and compare it to the works of Marsilio Ficino, Leonardo Da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Desiderius Erasmus of the Renaissance period we can see a very particular change in worldviews.

The nature gives seasons. From morning to night, as from cradle to the grave, is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress. The process of change and challenge is always at work. For some change brings cheer, whereas for others it may mean moments of chagrin. Both painful and pleasant, a shift from the established order to a new one is inevitable. There is no monotony.

I will never forget the day I discovered that I was leaving my life behind. New house, new school, new friends; it all seemed unreal. The place I grew up with all my friends was about to disappear, soon only to be a memory. I didn’t even get to say goodbye, was the only thought that travelled through my head. I left all my best friends behind with no notice. The final summer I spent in my house was one of the toughest summers of my life. All I wanted was to pause my life and go back to when life wasn’t hectic all the time. As much as I wanted to go back I couldn’t. Little did I know what the future held and how much my new life would later change me.

The world around us changes every day. It is the choice to whether we accept the change that will determine who we become. Once a week I sit on a bench in a park just off of 19th street. It is nothing special. A playground with a few swings with rusted chains, A slide with a bump in the middle, and a wooden park bench that is held together by the strength of two bolts. This park though at the surface appears to just be a park happens to be one of the most significant places in my life.

Growing up in a small town in Northeast Vermont, there isn’t much of anything. The economy is poor, there isn’t many jobs, and it’s cold. My hometown is similar to the made up town of Catamount in the novel, Continental Drift, by Russell Banks. I saw my family in likeness to the Dubois’s. My mom stayed home with us kids until we needed extra cash so she began to waitress. My dad got one of the better jobs at the new correctional facility a town over.

didn’t really do much back then, just realizing it now the way I acted, the words I said and the people I left behind it was only a matter of time that things would change. But before then I found myself lost, almost like I never belonged where I was. I was lost in the words spoken by others, the books all around me and the quiet life that often left me asking why. Soon afterward my life brightened up my ideals and thoughts changed and eventually I met friends who truly understood who I was. Back then the word “friend” was just a word; it was nothing more, nothing less. This is that story of how my life changed for the better, a story of hardship and bonds that would soon mend my broken life.