Deciding To Live - LITTER BOX
Self-Discovery in High SchoolMy name is Megan, and I’m a sophomore in high school. All throughout middle school I heard all these things about high school. People told me it was a scary place where upperclassman would shove me in lockers, and I’d get lost all the time. Back then, all of these comments made high school seem absolutely terrifying. However, now I’m in my second year of high school and instead of thinking of high school as a scary place, I think of it as another part of my life that has helped me grow as a person. Here, I have learned so much about people, life, but most importantly- myself. I believe high school alone has caused me to discover who I am.One of the biggest life lessons I have had to learn in life I learned through high school. I have learned that people always change. Friends have and still do, come in to my life and leave; as a result, I have become independent. I have figured out that I can only truly count on myself for everything, which has been a tough and hard lesson to learn. By not being as dependent on others, I have not been let down and hurt as much. I have learned so many things about myself because of being independent and self- sufficient. I have also learned what I expect from others, but most importantly, what I look for in a friend. I will never forget something my principal said during an assembly one time. She said, “I have learned how to be a good friend because of friends who have done me wrong and hurt me in the past.” This quote really hit me and stuck with me because high school is filled with fakeness, betrayal, and deception. I realized that in order to avoid a lot of pain and drama, I need to discover who I truly am and be content with it.There is an immense amount of peer pressure in high school. If you know your morals and beliefs, then you will not be as tempted to give in and be persuaded to do things you normally wouldn’t do. This is apart of discovering who you are. In high school you really discover what you believe in and what you think is right and wrong. One of my all time favorite quotes is by Alexander Hamilton. It states, “Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.” This is extremely true in high school. You really need to know who you are and what you believe in, that way you will be the person you want to be.High School is just a stepping stone that leads into your future. You learn so many things about who you are and your beliefs; this I believe. An unknown author backs up my belief by saying, “There’s a big world out there. Bigger than prom, bigger than high school, and it won’t matter if you were the prom queen or the quarterback of the football team or the biggest nerd. Find out who you are and try not to be afraid of it.”Stress during Junior Year of High SchoolI believe junior year in high school is the worst year in my entire school career. Junior year is full of unhealthy competition; the whole game is who is beating whom. There is the constant buzz of who has the higher class ranking and which colleges your peers are applying to.High school has long been covered in popular culture as a time of classes, sports and over exaggerated adolescent drama. However, these days junior year is the worst year in high school for many ambitious students aiming for increasingly selective colleges. These days many students drop an activity or hobby that they really enjoyed because their schoolwork took too much time. The average time it takes students to do homework during their junior year averages from four to five and a half hours of homework a night. There is not a lot of sleep going on. Sometimes you don’t know whether you are doing things because you enjoy them or because it looks good on your college applications. The thing that some people so not realize is that the pressure students face today is not only from teachers and parents but mostly from colleges. The things colleges make students do to be accepted is outrageous. One major cause of all the pressure is the SAT and the ACT.Many students fear that their SAT or ACT scores are not going to be good enough to get into certain colleges. I believe that colleges should not look at the SAT or ACT any more. Some colleges are in fact dropping the SAT/ACT requirement. There are many bright intelligent students out there who get all A’s and take advanced placement courses and do extra-curricular activities but do not excel in their SAT or ACT scores and colleges look right over them to the student who does not do as well and barely gets by in school but they get brilliant SAT/ACT scores. The constant pressure of being better than the student next to you is overwhelming and colleges create that type of atmosphere to see which student will be able to lie and cheat their way to the top. I don’t believe that there is a single student out there who does good honest work to achieve their goals and get into a good college, someone always cheats or lies about something. Colleges look for the most absurd things in a student when they apply. Students make up or exaggerate an extra-curricular activity just to make themselves look better than the next student. In today’s society I believe that parents, teachers, and colleges put too much pressure on students during their junior year. Society needs to lighten up and let students excel at things they are good at and improve in areas where needed. Each student offers something special and unique. It is not healthy for students to lie and cheat in school just to win the game of who is better, and who can get into the best Ivy League college possible. There are many bright students out there who do not get accepted to many colleges because the student next to them out-lied or exaggerated more than they did.The Power to ForgetI believe in the power to forget.On December 12, 1969, my world changed forever. My father was murdered. I was eleven years old.In the middle of the night I woke to flashing lights from a police car. A knock at the door, and I heard my mom answer it. Then I heard a man say: “Marlene, Wil’s been shot.”See, my dad was a cop. And as happens all too often, he was killed during a routine procedure, in this case a burglary investigation. They caught the man who killed my father that same night. He was tried and convicted, sentenced to die. That sentence was commuted in 1973 by the Supreme Court, and to this day he is in prison.I think he is, anyway. I don’t know for sure, because I have tried my very best to forget him. It was that, or succumb to the hatred that threatened to define my life.For a while I tried forgiveness, since that is supposed to be liberating. When I say “for a while,” I mean for years. But I failed. There are some things that cannot be forgiven, at least for me.Instead, I have slowly, and carefully, excised his name from my memory. Now and then something will happen; I’ll come across a story in the paper about him being up for parole, or a family friend will ask “whatever happened to so-and-so,” and I’ll have to start again to forget.It’s not easy. Much of our culture, much of our popular literature, is based around the theme of a son avenging the death of his father. The whole “find the bastard who shot my pa” thing. You may not notice it, but I do. And every time I hear about another officer down, every time Father’s Day rolls around on the calendar, I think about my dad. And I think about his death. And I deny the existence of the man who killed him.Even now, as I write this, his name tries to emerge, tries to struggle free from where I have buried it. But it means that I don’t have to live with a constant, aching anger. It means that I don’t have to be trapped in that moment of history. It means that I can continue with my life, never forgetting the love I have for my father, or what it meant for him to die, but not being possessed by a need for vengeance.I believe in the power to forget. How many old grudges still fuel the fires of revenge in this world? How often have more people had to die because of a fixation on a memory? How much better would things be if we could just clean the slate, forget the offenses we’ve suffered and the ones we’ve inflicted, and move on?Unhardened HeartsI often joke with my students that the course I teach—English 10—should be re-titled “Doom and Gloom Literature.” We read some pretty heavy texts over the course of the year. We discuss the potential for evil within all of us in Golding’s Lord of the Flies and the dangers of silence in the face of evil as we read Elie Wiesel’s Night.Each year, when we begin Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, about an African-American man who has been accused of a crime he did not commit, we inevitably have a class-wide discussion about things like prejudice and stereotypes in our culture, and where we draw the line between harmless and harmful beliefs. These statements always lead to a fascinating discussion, but this year, the discussion took on a markedly different tone.This year, my mostly African-American and Hispanic 10th graders began reading the book the day after a grand jury decided not to indict white New York City police officer Daniel Panataleo in the death of Eric Garner, an African-American man who was placed in a chokehold and died while resisting arrest. One week earlier, another grand jury had decided not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Michael Brown, an un-armed African-American teenager in Ferguson, Missouri.Where in previous years, it had taken a bit of time for my students to get to a discussion of race, this year, it came up immediately. In one class, two of my African-American students brought up Michael Brown and Eric Garner instantly and passionately shared their frustration with both grand jury decisions. As one boy explained to the class what had happened in both cases, my normally squirrely students became quiet and pensive. One of them asked if anyone remembered what had happened to Trayvon Martin in 2012. In another period, a shy girl gave an impassioned, extemporaneous speech about the existence and prevalence of racism in our country that I can only compare to Linus’ speech about the true meaning of Christmas in the Charlie Brown Christmas movie.When my students reach me, they’re young enough that they still believe that the world is neatly divided into “good” and “bad,” or “right” and “wrong.” They’re teetering at the edge of innocence and experience as they’re starting to realize that sometimes, good people make awful choices, and sometimes, seemingly hopeless and hard individuals are capable of kindness. Throughout the year, I try to teach my students to always strive to do the right thing in spite of how ugly our world sometimes seems.At the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, the protagonist, Scout, learns that doing the right thing isn’t necessarily always the easiest thing—but ultimately, it is our duty to think about things from another person’s point of view and to stand up for what it is right, even if—especially if—no one else will. During our discussion, my students arrived at that same conclusion.That day, I wept on my drive home, my heart impossibly heavy. Aren’t we supposed to be past these kinds of things as a society? Aren’t we supposed to be a society founded on equality, fairness, and justice? How is this still happening?I became a teacher because I believe in the power of young people to create a better world. I believe that young people possess unhardened hearts; I believe that we must do everything we can as adults to prevent our own hearts from hardening. Why is it that as we grow older, we become complacent? Why do we become indifferent to the unfairness and the injustices we witness on a daily basis? I believe that within all of us is a strong sense of right and wrong, yet oftentimes, we adults are hardened by our experiences, and we lose the empathy that we felt so easily as children.I fully recognize how easy it is to look at our world and to become cynical and to believe that humans are inherently bad. But I go to work every day, where I work with 15- and 16-year-old young people who are so hopeful about the future. Things haven’t quite caught up with them yet, as Dolphous Raymond says in the book. I hope things never willThe Ability to SnortOut of the many beliefs that I carry with me, there are only a few that I believe will carry with me forever. I believe in love, I believe in personal strength, I believe in memories and in good karma. I believe in music, compassion, and empathy. But most of all I believe in the power of smiles, giggles, and snorts.I find truth in Bill Cosby’s quote “You can turn painful situations around through laughter. If you can find humor in anything, even poverty, you can survive it.” I have been through many difficult stages in my life. I have found out that I am a rape baby, and I had witnessed my step-father kill himself by putting a gun in his mouth. The world seemed so disastrous and chaotic. I felt overwhelmed, down, and completely wanting to shut myself out from everyday life. But I finally came to the realization that I have the ability to walk without fear. I learned it’s still okay to smile and laugh. I have made it through each day with giggles and snorts. Besides the fact that laughter is great when you’re down, I believe that humor has the power to make you feel even happier when nothing is wrong. Some of the best memories I have are laughing hysterically with friends, just loving life. For some reason running around Wal-Mart and creating mischief is just icing on the cake. Those times when I was chuckling were the times of my life. I believe in Ronald Dahl’s quote “A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men”. And I believe in Dr. Seuss’s quote “I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells”. Giggling and snorting have taught me so many things. I came to the idea that life is not so much about succeeding, but being able to enjoy the fact that you are alive. It’s being able to find ways to make feel like it’s worth a lot more than what you originally thought it would be. It’s being able to walk into a store and have grocery cart races in the empty isles not caring what the rest of the world thinks, and laughing at yourself that matters. Who doesn’t just love that feeling of lightness that comes with laughing?I have learned that laughter is indeed the best medicine. It’s a natural high that is like no other. Snorting is something that comes so easily. Thank you, humor, for existing and for helping the world to keep their heads up with a smile on their face, even if there are tears.Paying Attention to the Silver LiningI’m 57. Divorced after 28 years of marriage, I no longer have a house. I own very little, make a marginal living, and I lost my youngest child to suicide when he was 21. At my core I am grateful for it all — even my son’s death. It gave me the lens through which to see everything.I believe in a silver lining.I will forever carry my son with me. How can a mother not? This is the only choice I had: I could either carry him as a bag of rocks or I could live a life celebrating him. Now let me be honest here: I wailed for months before I figured out how to trade the rocks for the joy, and found the silver lining thing. I’m a people person, but Arrick was really a people person. He told me once, “I talk to everyone I want to talk to.”“Everyone?” I asked incredulously.“Well, yeah, I might miss someone I need to know.”And now, five years later, I’ve embraced my son’s philosophy.My daughter on the other hand, is more cautious — she shushes me when she sees I am about to say hello to a strange woman by the subway stop. “You can’t do that, Mom,” she says half laughing, knowing that I now see every single encounter as filled with possibilities that can make a difference in my life; that I am more eager than ever to connect with others.Waiting for the train, I hear strains of an Ornette Coleman tune. I smile, and drop a precious five-dollar bill into the open case. My Arrick played the saxophone. I wish I had his saxophone’s soft leather traveling bag with me, so I could give it to this man in case he someday finds himself on the way to a non-street gig. I tell him that. He smiles.Arrick couldn’t figure out how to make his way, how to live out the rest of his life. I believe he wanted to. When I call up that beautiful face and those elegant cocoa-brown fingers running along the sax’s keys, I am always convinced of it. The youngest of three, Arrick was the smartest, the funniest, and we all say so.He was also the darkest, but no one ever saw him as suicide dark. The why of these choices is often not clear — actually downright murky. I still don’t know what brought him to suicide. What is clear, however, is that my son continues: He continues to be part of my story, the family’s story, and every day now I’m still making connections on his behalf.And so I smile at the checker in the grocery store, discuss architecture with the homeless guy who reads every bad-weather day in the library. I tell the woman my daughter thinks I shouldn’t speak to that I love her fuchsia hat with the funky feathers, and I thank the saxophone player for the fine Coleman on a subway platform in wintry New York City.Arrick’s death made me sit up and pay attention. I lingered on the edges before, playing it safe, but I’m in the game now. Arrick showed me the silver lining, and I’m showing it to everyone I meet.Accomplishing Big Things in Small PiecesI carry a Rubik's Cube in my backpack. Solving it quickly is a terrific conversation starter and surprisingly impressive to girls. I've been asked to solve the cube on the New York City subway, at a track meet in Westchester and at a café in Paris.I usually ask people to try it first. They turn the cube over in their hands, half-heartedly they make a few moves and then sheepishly hand it back. They don't even know where to begin. That's exactly what it was like for me to learn how to read. Letters and words were scrambled and out of sequence. Nothing made sense because I'm dyslexic.Solving the Rubik's Cube has made me believe that sometimes you have to take a few steps back to move forward. This was a mirror of my own life when I had to leave public school after the fourth grade. It's embarrassing to admit, but I still couldn't consistently spell my full name correctly.As a fifth-grader at a new school that specialized in what's called language-processing disorder, I had to start over. Memorizing symbols for letters, I learned the pieces of the puzzle of language, the phonemes that make up words. I spent the next four years learning how to learn and finding strategies that allowed me to return to my district's high school with the ability to communicate my ideas and express my intelligence.It took me four weeks to teach myself to solve the cube — the same amount of time it took the inventor, Erno Rubik. Now, I can easily solve the 3x3x3, and the the 4x4x4, and the Professor's Cube, the 5x5x5. I discovered that just before it's solved, a problem can look like a mess, and then suddenly you can find the solution. I believe that progress comes in unexpected leaps.Early in my Rubik's career, I became so frustrated that I took the cube apart and rebuilt it. I believe that sometimes you have to look deeper and in unexpected places to find answers. I noticed that I can talk or focus on other things and still solve the cube. There must be an independent part of my brain at work, able to process information.The Rubik's Cube taught me that to accomplish something big, it helps to break it down into small pieces. I learned that it's important to spend a lot of time thinking, to try to find connections and patterns. I believe that there are surprises around the corner. And, that the Rubik's Cube and I, we are more than the sum of our parts.Like a difficult text or sometimes like life itself, the Rubik's Cube can be a frustrating puzzle. So I carry one in my backpack as a reminder that I can attain my goals, no matter what obstacles I face.And did I mention that being able to solve the cube is surprisingly impressive to girls?Deciding To LiveI believe I am a climber.Three years ago, a series of medical and personal crises took what was a clinical depression and made it something much darker.I thought of it as falling — as jumping — off a bridge on a rainy winter day: three seconds in the air before I hit the water and plunged deep into the icy cold, my heavy coat pulling me deeper. And the surface far overhead — too far away.This is the question that kept me from making the image a real one. What if I changed my mind? Jumping into the water, the air in my lungs would fail me before I could swim back to the living world. I would know for those last seconds that I did want to live after all, but it would be too late.I'm not sure why I started climbing. I walked through the door of the local climbing gym one day on a whim. It was an alien world: strong beautiful men and women, towering walls under sodium vapor lights, white dust filling the air. Light instead of dark. Up instead of down. It was in every way the opposite of what was inside me.The second time I climbed, I got to a move where I was sure I would fall. I was 25 feet up on a rope, but I didn't know yet that I could trust it. I heard my voice say out loud, "I have a choice here: fear or joy." What I meant was, climb or don't climb, live or die.In the more than two years since then, I have climbed hundreds of days — inside and out, sometimes tied to a rope, often not.I do pay a price here. My body can be so bruised from hitting walls that people ask me about my home situation. Nine months ago, I broke my leg and ankle. I healed fast, but the risk remains. Next time I might not.Climbing requires a coldblooded decision to live. If I am inattentive or careless, I will fall. Every time I climb at the gym, or rope up for a route outside, or go bouldering — which is climbing without a rope, and often more dangerous — I am taking a risk. And I am committing to staying alive.Now, I believe in climbing, in not jumping. Jumping would have been easy: Just step over the bridge railing and let go. Climbing is harder, but worth it. I believe that deciding to live was the right decision.There's no way to describe the terrible darkness of depression in a way that nondepressed people can understand. Now, I'm less focused on the darkness. Instead, I think about the joy I feel in conquering it and the tool I used.I am a climber, and I am alive.The Power of SleepI believe in the power of sleep. Pure, deep, easy sleep. Quiet, dark sleep, that removes you completely from the world. A good night’s sleep.Most mornings I drag myself out of bed, neither rested nor refreshed, starting the day already behind. I push my cat away, snap at my husband, and drive to work in a mildly angry daze. I’m not particularly a morning person, but it’s not that. It’s that most nights I stay up too late, stalked and driven by the to-do list that forever hovers before me. My eyes start to droop; my thoughts begin to wander. My body and the better parts of my brain signal me in every way possible that it is time to go to bed. But a nagging voice speaks up, pushes me ever onward, telling me that I have dishes and paperwork to do and miles to go before I sleep. And so I seldom go to bed when I should. I stay up too late, and my mornings (and my husband) suffer.Oh, but those mornings when I have had enough sleep! Those mornings following nights in which I have successfully turned off my brain? Those mornings are gifts. I wake before the alarm and lie in bed, at peace with the light making its way through my window. My cat nuzzles against me, and I am happy to return her affection. I look at my husband, and my heart aches for a moment with love for him. I drive to work, waving other drivers ahead of me in traffic, preferring to have a couple more seconds of time out in the beautiful world.On these days I am happier. I feel more love, more joy, more peace. I am better at my job. I think more clearly. I am a better wife, a better mother, a better pet owner. And, I get more done! On these days, the eternal to-do list is less daunting, more of a challenge than a judgment. With my newfound energy, I can clean house or wash clothes, I can write, I can grocery shop. Even better, on these days my well-rested mind and I can tell the to-do list to go to hell. We are smart enough to know that sometimes the best move is to lie completely still and just be. These are the days I live for.I don’t know how or when we stopped believing in sleep, when we relegated it to a status somewhere between “complete waste of time” and “something to do when dead,” but it’s time to take back our nights. We need our sleep. The world would be a better place if we were all less cranky, less irritable, less exhausted. Even if the dishes aren’t done.I believe in the power of sleep. It’s right at the top of my to-do list.Everyone Is IncludedI was not the least popular kid in my school, but I was probably in the bottom third. Hoping to elevate my social position a bit before high school, I begged my parents for permission to throw an eighth grade graduation party. To my utter shock and delight, they said yes.I quickly drafted a list of invitees, including only my two best friends and fifteen or so of the most popular kids. But when I brought the list to my mother, she shook her head and explained, “No, you must invite the entire class or the party is off.” Was she out of her mind? She rarely entertained her own friends, and now she was essentially forcing me to invite fifty or so young teens to our home?Desperate for the party, I agreed to her terms. I spent an entire period of recess tracking down my classmates to pass out invitations. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the last people I found was Maureen. Heavier and more awkward than most, Maureen typically spent recesses huddled in a corner trying to avoid the gaze of the other kids.Maureen watched with apprehension as I approached her, no doubt fearing some put-down or teasing. I handed her the invitation and said, with a confident smile on my face, “I hope you can come, too!” I will never forget the look on her face as she took the invitation from me and offered a shy smile. At that moment, my mother’s requirement to include everyone suddenly made perfect sense.Some twenty-five years later, my own daughter, Sophie, started preschool in our neighborhood. At the parent meeting, we were informed of a rigid school rule: “Everyone is included.” For example, kids were not permitted to exclude other kids from their play, kids could not discuss play dates that happened outside school hours that did not include everyone in the class, cubbies could only be used to distribute party invitations if the whole class was invited, and so forth.Later, I overheard Sophie imploring her younger sister to let her join in a game of Barbies by explaining, “Everyone is included, Jessica!” This poignant incident made me recall my experience learning this mantra, and made me reflect on how universally this tenet applied to almost every area of my life.I throw parties that are too crowded and that require too much preparation and cleanup. My small kids can get overwhelmed by the number of children at their birthday parties. The softball team I organize for my office has too many players. A quick lunch at work with one friend quickly morphs into a group outing of eight or ten. But these events, with their boisterous chaos and unpredictability, are more enjoyable to me than many smaller events or intimate gatherings.More significantly, in my work as a prosecutor, I believe that the law applies equally to everyone. The theft of a Ford Escort should be prosecuted with as much fervor as the theft of an Escalade. The rape of a prostitute deserves as much attention as the rape of a suburban mom. And the murder of a drug dealer should be pursued as heartily as the murder of a prominent public figure.More broadly, my political and religious beliefs are founded on this tenet as well. Democracy is premised on the concept of “one person, one vote.” Jesus taught us to “love your neighbor” and lived this commandment by loving enemies, tax collectors, prostitutes, foreigners, lepers, sinners, and even those who would harm him.The vivid memory of Maureen’s happiness at being included in my party helps to remind me of the value of this core belief and to apply it even when it may be difficult to do so. This is what I believe, and it guides me to this day: everyone is included. ................
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