Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

In the fall of 2012, my mother almost succumbed to her illness. I had just begun my freshman year of high school midst angry conversations between my parents and the threat of separation. It would seem as if they bickered about the most irrelevant things, almost as if they had no other reason to fight other than the fight itself. Those moments were excruciatingly lonely, my father worked until the dead of night and my mother would come home exhausted from treatment. I now know that there was no one who felt more unvalued than my mother. I wish I had the ability to iron away this blunder that destiny had fabricated, however foolish this desire is.

The day was October 8th, 2014. I hardly played. One school day, my 5th teacher, Ms. Smit said, “flyers for the basketball team on the table” ordinarily I took one. Kids from 4th, 5th, and 6th grade came to try out for the team. After tryouts, a paper next to the nurse's office was hung up. The paper sheet named those who had made the team. Surprisingly, I made the team, most likely from my height. I felt like I shouldn’t have made the team. At the time, I barely started to play basketball. I went to the practices at school and tried to make myself a little bit better, since a tournament was about to begin in a few weeks.

Everything is perfectly fine, everything is great, then one day it all comes crashing down and shattered pieces are left. My life would never be the same but I guess change is for the best and it forced me to become the person I am today. It’s rough to be the oldest child, especially when your mom is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer and you have 3 younger sisters that look to you for comfort when their mom can’t be there. When the cancer is spread throughout your moms body doctors can’t just get rid of it no matter how badly you wish they could. Rounds of chemotherapy only slow it down, yet it’s still there a lurking monster waiting to reappear at any given moment. Nothing can even begin to describe the fear I felt, and still have to deal

My mother became depressed, my father became disabled, and my brother was skipping school. I continued going to school from eight until four, which was a big relief in my life because it made me forget the hard times. My grades slowly began to decline, as well as my motivation. I gave up many opportunities such as attending New York’s number one specialized high school. I recognized my mistakes and was able to identify my failure. School was not the only place where I lacked interest in because I also slowly started to push my friends away. As a young teenager, I did not think I would ever make it to college. I became frustrated at my parents because my life was ruined and it was all their fault.

However, my junior year also held some troubles for me. In October, my cousin had a stroke and passed away. Visiting her in the hospital and attending her funeral brought back unresolved issues I had from my brother’s death in 2010. I didn't know how to cope, so I fell into a deep depression. I had no energy; it was like my brain wouldn’t let me do anything I used to enjoy. I stopped playing the piano after having played for ten years. I loved to run, but I stopped completely. I didn’t have the energy for either.

When I was 10 years old,my sister Jenelle died of brain cancer at 23 years old. I wanted to have a relationship with her and I knew that we could have had an amazing one. I wanted to grow older with her and my younger sister,as the group of friends that we all were. I have been diagnosed with depression at the start of highschool,and I was always deep down depressed not only with her passing,but with all the bullying that I had to face. Ever since I found a group of friends,I have been able to cope with my feelings and I have been successful. College was a hard transition for me managing all the time for myself and balancing the classes. Thankfully I have been doing alright,and I want to keep going so I can make my family proud.Lastly,instead of being a handful I feel like I can be

I had always wanted to go and try out for the school volley ball team but i wasn't sure if i was going to make it or not. I made the first cut and then the second cut. At the last tryout i put all the effort i had into it, hoping that I could make the team. The final cut came and i was not on the list. I was devastated. This was very hard to take. I told my parents that i didn't make it and they said that they knew i tried my best and that there is always next year in high school. Sure enough they were right. Coming into grade 9, I made the volleyball team and have been playing ever since. I thought that i was panicking and it was over but it turns out that i was just choking and thanks to my parents they helped me out of that

During my sophomore year, I became depressed and antisocial due to problems in my life. My mother has been sick with a brain tumor since 2009 and she was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2012. It has been very hard on me and especially for my mother. I worry about her because she has shown signs of severe depression, she often talks about that she would rather be dead than alive anymore. After all of the pain, all of the humiliation of not being able to walk well, the embarrassment of not being able to write well, all of the staring and comments I would hear about my mother, she is still strong. After 6 years of pain and suffering along the way, I do not blame her. Everything seems to get worse. She now needs surgery due to avascular necrosis that was caused by many years of chemotherapy. I began to lose motivation slowly because I did not have any friends in any of my classes and I felt like I was stuck in a

I have had a pretty painless life, compared to most people. The only struggles I have had up to this point have been difficult tests, or getting cut from a team. This summer, however I experienced the most humbling moment of my life. One night in the second week of summer, I was at my friend’s house playing an intense game of pickup basketball.  The second game of the night began, I checked the ball in not knowing that my life would change for the next 8 months. As I sprinted toward the hoop I felt something that I had never once felt before.

At a young age, having all four of my grandparents die was crushing. One in front of me, two by suicide and one to cancer. In the second grade when my dad went to rehab, not only eroding our relationship, but also tearing apart my family. As a result, during my third grade year, sleep was rare due to the echoing fighting that I would hear in the adjacent room. Meanwhile this lack of sleep only made school worse. Being called a “retard” because dyslexia made it a pain in the ass to read. This fearful environment slowly began to embed anxiety into my young self. Now that my family was begging to get tired of my hometown in Arizona, we packed our bags and moved to San Diego. In 6th grade is where I got into my first fist fight in the middle school locker room, where Mr. Beckley had to break us apart. Only giving me the “new kid” a bad reputation to some, but respect to others. The ones who began to give me respect, would only bring me down further than I already was. On to my later years in middle school where I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. Witch felt like a constant rain cloud over me at all times, where the weight of my bed sheets was too much to handle. Therefor causing more chaos in my family. This would give myself an almost constant knot in my throat ready to break down and cry at any part of the day. But like any story, there's light at the end of the tunnel. No matter how long it seems or how dark it gets, there is... Going into my freshman things

It was my first day of Grade 10, I didn’t want to go through being that new kid and having the thought of life being so complicated again but this time I had a reminder that if I went through it 6 years ago and turned out fine, I can do it again. It was very difficult at first because I had to spend lunch time alone and no one to talk to in class. I’m a very outgoing person and make friends easily or so I’ve been told, so after two weeks, I have made new friends. Two of the people I had made friends with Helen and Mika, were on the basketball team and I had told them I’ve always wanted to join basketball. They were begging me to join the team. The first day of tryout I didn’t want to go, I've never joined a sport before so I had this sick feeling that I wouldn’t make the cut, surprisingly I did. I was in grade 10 so I was in the junior team but we would always practice with the seniors because my coach wanted us to do really good for that season. On my first ever game, I went on the court with a lot of confidence and didn’t feel anxious at all. I shot two points at my first game and that made me feel so good about myself. I grew really close with my team and bonded really well with them. At the end of the season, we won all of our league games and the championship

I was born in Ormond Beach, Florida on October 25, 1997. One year later, we moved to Cleveland, Ohio. It was there where my father completed his residency at the Cleveland Clinic and my little brother was born.

The most traumatic event in my life was when my father passed away in 2005, when I was only seven. At first, I hadn’t understood his death. I knew what death was, and that it was permanent, but I hadn’t accepted the fact that he was gone until long after his death. My mother was a mess, and I was a confused second grader who could do nothing to help her. We began to go to counselors and psychologists, who all made me feel very uncomfortable. All they wanted was to talk about what had happened to my dad, when it was the last thing I wanted to say anything about. I laid in bed crying for a few weeks, knowing it was because of his death, but I felt emptiness rather than sadness or anger. My mother began to take medication for depression, and still continues to do so. At only seven, I believed her sadness was my fault. To be honest, I still feel hurt when I see her taking the depression medication. I know that I had nothing to do with his death, but it granted me with an unwelcoming sense of guilt. I had just been with him the night before his death, and now he had been cremated into a bag of ashes. All of my teachers were very precautious about mentioning him, and I didn’t know how to process all the new attention I had received at school. I was definitely depressed, but I found a way out of my slump. I distracted myself from his death and did all of my school work from my absences as quickly as I could, and

I attended Squareville high school, along with about one hundred other kids. Squareville was small, population of about six hundred. I, being one of the six hundred, didn’t mean much to Squareville and I was well aware of it. I live with my mom, Joann, and my sister, Hannah; My dad passed away about a year ago. Our, now, three person, family isn’t nearly the same. We used to laugh and smile at breakfast, we used to tell jokes at dinner, and wish we could all be together during lunch but obligations made it infeasible. My dad refused to ever show he was in pain so the day my dad was diagnosed with cancer was shocking, then two weeks later he passed. The cancer was terminal and the doctors had caught it way too late. After he passed things

I have never felt so close to giving up on myself. My grades were slipping, my attendance at school was at an all time low, and I was sensing a lot of negativity towards me from my teachers. See they had no idea what I was going through, and never once did they bother to ask. It was as if it was normal to them that a student who had never failed a class and there six years in the public school system, was failing almost all of their classes out of nowhere. But I couldn’t put my problems on them, I had no right to think like that, but I felt so alone at the time I didn’t know who or what to blame, but I did know that if I just kept pushing through that I would get through this journey, I couldn’t afford to give up on myself, and give up on my family.