Personal Narrative: I Grew Up In An Emotionally Torn-Apart Family

For a long time, I've been struggling with my grades and keeping up with my school work. In middle school, I had a lot of low grades and did not truly seem to care. My mom decided to assign me to a tutor every week to help bring my grades up, until halfway through my freshman year when I stopped due to the fact I didn't need the tutoring anymore. I was told that I was doing well enough that I could handle it on my own, which motivated me to start working diligently on my own. I was an average student at that point, I had mostly A's and B's with a C or two, but I hoped to prove that I could do more. I had to find a new way of dealing with my study and learning habits in order to efficiently work hard and achieve the grades I desired. My goal

Major changes in my life have affected my high school career, but a large impact came from the death of my father in eighth grade. Before his passing, I was an average A/B student in middle school and even elementary school, which quickly changed in 8th grade when my classes became too hard for me to handle. I decided the best thing for my mental health was to drop out of my higher level classes. This lead to being in standard classes throughout my first year of high school with minimal effort from my part. After constantly missing school, I failed my second quarter. Instead of bouncing back from this, it pushed me down, making me believe I would never be able to recover. Without any motivation, I ended my ninth grade year with a grade point average of 1.4.

As the Frost Festival finally drew to a close, the excitement of the frost fae, both royal and non-royal, began to wane as the festivities and parties died down, and the frosty multicolored flags of the various frost fae Clans were taken down and folded neatly for storage until the next Festival. I’d been working as a Frost Guardian for over twelve hours protecting the princess of the Snowflake clan, and, even though I thought that I was going to be beyond exhausted and more than ready for bed, I still felt strangely wide awake and even a little buzzed with adrenaline, like I’d gotten energy from the remnants of the festivities that had happened around me and the fact that I was finally training in the real world as a Guardian.

During my time at Union County College I have been faced with a lot of difficulties. I’ve struggled along the way but one thing I do believe is that I have the power to do better. My GPA has been affected by my personal mistakes. In my past semesters I have let my job take over my life rather than let school be most important. I have also let my personal family problems affect my work ethic. But through my fall 2014, it was most difficult because of March 2014 I lost my father through an unexpected heart attack. Throughout my fall semester I did struggle and cope with my father not being here anymore. I believed that I wasn’t focused enough because I used fall semester as a time to occupy myself rather that time out to deal with my father’s

I’ve been trudging along for what seems like hours. I lost count of my steps sometime after my car broke down. When I look around all I see is an almost tangible grey curtain hiding everything except for a small segment of the highway. As I look forward the dark grey of the asphalt blends into the fog. I have no Idea what time it is when the fog rolled in my phone died. Without a clock, any length of time seems to go on forever, especially when the sun is hiding behind the fog. I just something I don’t understand about my situation, there has been no change in light since the fog rolled in. Same brightness the whole time. It’s almost like it’s not that I can’t tell time is passing. It’s that time isn’t passing, but that’s impossible.

Adversity has always been a close cousin. Being born in a third world country, I had to overcome adversity arriving to America. Once in America I walked with adversity as I faced many cultural and lingual barriers. In my journey with my cousin we shared many priceless moments. One of the moments that stuck to me was my recent trip to Pakistan.

It has been a difficult journey for my first year at Western to where I understood that I will lose my financial aid and my scholarship after spring term. In fall term I thought that I would start a new lifestyle where I can get away from my families issues. My family has been my priority with school since the outcome of my parent’s separation and the financial struggle that my father had to face. However, the issues my family had has followed me to school where it took me away from my school work. I have failed most of my classes fall term and I knew that I can’t afford another mistake. I made it a goal to make sure that I don’t make the same mistake that I did for fall term. I passed most of my classes except for math because of how I wouldn’t asked the professor for of

The clouds were black, immeasurable, and grotesque. I still believe it was because my best friend was leaving for war. My friend Nicholas was the only person that I could have reliance and certainty with. He was the person that when the stresses of the world got to heavy on my shoulders he would pick the world up of my shoulders and carry the burden of the stresses of reality for me. In the end there are no words to describe the signification he has in my life and there is no comfort that can fix the loss that I feel in my heart because of his absence. So for the time being my heart will be in two places, half with me here in Denver, Colorado and the other half in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Sorry in advance if this is be too much information for some. . . .

For the past seventeen years of my life minus a few months, I have lived in the United States. I grew up skiing and bicycling in Grand Rapids, Michigan, until my family decided to move all the way out west to Flagstaff, Arizona. Many eleven-year-olds might become stubborn and defensive in response to such a massive, life-changing move, but I remember embracing it because I was with my family, and I was ready to face any obstacle that unveiled itself to me because I knew that my late comedic father, my worrisome mother, and my troublesome brother would be right by my side. As we made the two-day drive from Michigan to Arizona in our SUV together, we watched the numbers on the odometer crawl up more and more until there were 2,000 more miles on the car than there were when we started, and we

I grew up in a messed-up environment as a child. On my mother's side of the family, no one took care of their children. Most of them even gave up custody of their children. They all were alcoholics and cared more about the men they were sleeping with more than their kids. They all were welfare and s.s.i. recipients and dated people who were on their same level. On my dad's side of the family, they are all rich and stuck up. My great grandfather opened a computer graphics company when computer graphics first came out and the business was successful. He allowed his grandchildren who lived in the Virginia area to work there as well as made sure they got an education in computers and graphic design. Through his business he also paid for his

Going into my junior year of cross-country and already making it to state the previous year, there was no way I wasn’t going again. Well, as many people have experienced before me; I was faced with adversity. Now some people decide to hide from it and others seek to conquer the task. I had to choose between the two when I started experiencing growing pains in my right hip.

Ever since freshman year I have been challenged with the problem of family issues as well as needing to raise my grade point average. In the beginning of ninth grade, my little sister and I were taken away from my mom then placed into foster care with family friends. While staying in their care, they didn’t very much care about the grades that I had, which reflected on me not caring, so my grades plundered my freshman year until my dad received custody of me. Once he gained custody is when I moved from Tennessee to California. It was a tremendous adjustment for me because I was moving away from my entire family I was raised with, to be living with my dad, my half-brother, along with my half-sister; whom I had only visited four or five times

During my sophomore year, I had gotten into the wrong crowd. I started hanging out with a group of people that I thought I could rely on and trust but in the end they just brought me down. I started struggling in my classes, which caused my grades to fall. School wasn’t a concern for me and my parents were watching me go downhill. They would ask me what was happening when I would bring home my grade card or look at progress book, because I normally told them that I was doing great. My mother mostly had realized that my friends were not who I should be hanging around because they was not taking me down a good path. On September 12, 2013 was my Sophomore homecoming. My friends and I ended up going out for dinner and then we all headed to the dance. The dance wasn’t very exciting so we all thought that we would just head to Abby’s house. We ended up leaving Abby’s house and staying out all night in town, getting ourselves into things we shouldn’t have. Toward the end of my Sophomore year I started to fade away from that group and focused more on my schooling. I ended up getting my grades up too at least C’s. The following years I had to really push myself to get my GPA back to where I wanted it. Graduating high school I had a 2.9 GPA and at the end of my first semester of college, I had a 3.6. This just shows that hard work pays off and if you push yourself hard enough you can accomplish anything. This semester I plan on raising my GPA to at least a 3.7. If I didn’t have the support I did and still have today, I would have never been where I am right now. I am so thankful to have my parents and even my grandparents in my life. Starting my junior year, going into softball, from the first game to the last, my support system was at every game. This really impacted my life knowing that my grandparents would drive anywhere just to watch a game of ball for an hour or two. It’s not just sports it’s anything that I have that

Devastated, I ran to my room gushing my eyes out. All these emotions going through my head of how my life would be without my parents in the same room or even house. From what I remember it all started about mid-June, the weeks before that were crucial. My parents would always argue over how to deal with a situation between me and my brother, Skyler. They hardly spoke to one another, but when they did they would just start bickering. I remember, one night after dinner they both went into ''their'' room with the door locked yelling at one another. Skyler and I didn’t know what to do, so we went downstairs and tried to figure out what was going to happen. With a scared tone I asked if mom and dad were going to get a divorce?" He answered back '' No, they love each other, they wouldn’t do that to us." That following night, was a school night everything was quiet except for my crying. I couldn’t sleep; all I was thinking about how it's going to affect my family.