Essay The Best Way to Grow Up

the most part. These years in a persons life have often been referred to as emerging adulthood.

Being taller and more educated isn’t the only fact that goes along with growing up, but you also have to be mature and have difficult times in life that you may have to face. Growing up means you have to be be strong about yourself, be independent and know that life won’t always be easy. Starting off, growing up in the article Fish Cheeks by Amy Tan means when you grow up, you have to be strong about yourself. For example, in paragraph 7 it declares, “After everyone had gone, my mother said to me, “You want to be the same as American girls on the outside.” She handed me an early gift.

When I was a sophomore my mother was diagnosed with cancer and as a result, I have spent most of my college career dealing emotional with the result. She is free of disease as of right now but it was a long and tumultuous journey to get there. I practically spent 2 years without a mother because she was so sick and I had to take her role. I organized family events, cooked them meals when I could, did their shopping all while going to school three hours away and having constant fear that my mother and the love of my life was going to die. That is only my personal struggle with it, not even taking into account her trauma or my fathers or brothers. It almost seems selfish to reflect on this because it was nothing compared to what she was going through. I went through stages where I was horrified and so scared and then I was angry and selfish. I wanted my mother back, I wanted her to make me dinner when I came home from college and send me care packages again. I wanted her to go shopping every weekend like she used to and spend money on things that weren’t hospital bills. I wanted to call her and hear something other than how she couldn’t get chemotherapy that week because she was so weak and was rushed to the hospital for a blood transfusion. I was tired of talking to people about it and people asking if I was okay. I felt like a broken record, “Yes, I’m okay. Yes, school is

Ask my teachers, friends, coaches, and family, they’ll all tell you that I’m mature. The way I hold myself responsible for my life, my studies, and my activities through the good and bad is a unique quality about me that they admire, but also know little to nothing about.

When my dad came home that evening he sat me down and asked me if I knew what cancer was. I had an idea so I just nodded my head, he went on to tried to explain to me how bad the cancer was that my mom had been diagnosed with. Seeing my dad so afraid scared me. The fear I felt then led me to realize that I needed to try and hide it because it would only hurt my dad more to see his children so upset. I did my best to help, I tucked my little sisters into bed while my mom was away at the hospital, read them stories and did the best I could at preparing snacks to comfort them. After my mom arrived home and she recovered from the surgery she started chemotherapy. The miserable treatment that attacks the cancer also makes her very ill. Every other week she was sick. Before every bad week I wanted to cry, but that wouldn’t help anyone. Lane and Kenna already were crying, if I cried it could only hurt my parents

The transition state between childhood and adulthood is difficult and sometimes frustrating. I find myself craving independence but not really grasping it. I have come far and overcome many challenges academically and personally, and I continue to face new ones every day but this must be one of the hardest yet. I like to think that I have everything figured out but the reality is that I do not. Nonetheless, I am relentlessly trying to put together the pieces of my life no matter how difficult it is to see the big picture, and luckily for me I was blessed with parents who instilled in me the value of hard work and perseverance.

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

Watching my mother live from pay check to pay check when I was young was difficult. It was always hard for my mom to keep up with other parents but, she still somehow managed to get me everything I wanted, and more. Even though I was too young to understand, I could feel the stress, and the struggles my mom faced every day. She was only 20 years old when I was born and, because of that she had no choice but to grow up fast. At such a young age, I saw the effects of being a single parent, and the ways it changed my mom. She not only had to be a young mother but, she had to find a way to replace the void of a father, or a father figure in my life. My mom was strong, independent and courageous. Growing up watching her live her dreams under all the circumstances she faced, made me want to strive for a better life for myself. Seeing how hard is was to live and to have enough

Life is a process where the most unexpected happens. When growing up you face many problems, and later accomplishments, but the hardest part of life is having to cope with the transition from childhood to adulthood. Many people fear the fact of them having to take on various responsibilities and not having the same support or dependence as they when they were a child, but those encounters are the ones that shape you and help you become a responsible and independent individual.

So far, the college experience has made me a changed person. College changed me into a better person on many occasions. I have learned to be more responsible, when it comes down to getting work done. In college you must be responsible. I have also changed my attitude. Moving from high school to college is a big step; if you don’t change your ways for the better then you might not be successful in college. When you reach college then is the time that you become an adult.

It all started with our family sitting at the dinner table with my mom crying, holding crumpled up tissues with black streaks of mascara on it. My dad nervous enough to say, “Your mom has stage four breast cancer.” Those words have stuck in my head clear as a bell for the last eight years. Our faces of curiosity soon turned into fear. As an eight year old I didn’t understand a lot of words grownups said, but those burning words were sharp knifes on my throat.

There are many factors that constitute being an adult. An adult is much more than turning the age of 18. The definition in the dictionary states an adult means being completely grown: fully developed and mature. I think there is much more that defines an adult. In the United States an adult is considered to be someone who takes responsibility of themselves and their actions. An adult has stability in their life and is able to take care of themselves physically, mentally, financially and emotionally. In other countries and cultures there definition of an adult differs.

A common piece of everybody’s vocabulary today is a word used in various contexts with little understanding to comprehend what it really means. “Maturity”, the stream of questions that come to our mind when we begin to ponder on the eight letter word is numerous. The most basic being, “What is maturity? How does one step up on the pedestal of maturity? And how do we measure maturity?” Einstein puts his perspective on maturity in an even more complicated manner, “I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity”, this view point does paint us a picture of maturity, but leads us to a whole new world of mystification.

Remember when we were young and all we could think of was growing up and getting to do ‘grownup’ things? We spent our whole childhood thinking of what we would do when we finally ‘grew up’, and here we are, almost completely grown up and we still haven’t made up our mind of what it is we will do when we grow up. We’ve painted this pretty little picture in our head of what it’ll be like when we eventually do grow up, and when it finally comes for the picture to be taken off the wall and put into action, it’s not nearly as fun as creating the painting.

My parents divorced when I was 11 and my mother left for Europe to be with her family. She definitely moved to USA when I was 16. I was really close to her while growing up so after she left I did not really have a female figure to look up too or to share my worries with. I grew up in the city and I was going to a private school; being the kid without a mother at home made me feel different but that was not something you could talk about in my dad’s house. He is a proud man and he put that pride in us so we had to keep our heads up all the time. Still, I had people talking on my back. I started keeping to myself from there and doing everything on my own without asking anyone help because that is how my dad wanted us to be: educated, successful, proud and independent so we wouldn’t have to deal with failure or rejection. I realize today that as people, we will always need someone’s help at some point in our life, and pride is not everything. It is hard letting go of old habits, but I am trying to be more of a people person because we can also learn from failure and rejection. They are all part of life.