draft/ essay two

School Daze: High School Reflections

My fondest memories of High School were the train rides back and fourth to school. I remember riding the train with my friends and having a good time; a care free time; now six years removed from high school graduation I wonder where those times have gone. It used to be that my only worries concerned pimples, clothes, girls and how not having pimples and ugly clothes would get me the girls. I remember the high school basketball team. We were always undermanned and the personnel we had wasn’t very good collectively, but we had fun and we worked hard. I guess we figured that if we couldn’t gain satisfaction in the “win” column we could at least give it all that we had out on the basketball court. I came to the Hudson School as an 8th grader.
I had never heard of the city of Hoboken before being accepted there and I did not like the idea of having to leave my friends behind in Hart middle and East Orange high, but even after being ridiculed for going to private school and having my toughness questioned by the guys in the neighborhood I was able to grin and bear it and soon after that I got over it. There was one person that helped me get over it rather quickly. At the age of fourteen I had never saw anyone that I thought was as beautiful as this girl whom I met on the train ride home on my second day of 8th grade. It was like puppy love on my end. I remember looking at her during that train ride and being at a loss for words. If that first train ride was my last chance to make a good impression on her, then I would’ve failed miserably. Luckily I got a few chances to redeem myself. Once I stopped being in awe of her we became really good friends and soon we got into a relationship.
I was in 8th grade and she was a high school freshman so it wasn’t going to last simply because I was too immature to be in a real relationship and although it hurt that she broke up with me I got over it after a few days and we resumed being friends, but there was something inside of me that didn’t want to let it go, something inside of me that had to have this girl. I was popular in high school. I wasn’t the ideal symbol of popularity; I was short, I had acne and I wasn’t the Adonis that every guy wanted to be and every girl wanted to be with, but what I lacked in good physical attributes I made up for with charisma and personality. I mastered the art of acting as if I didn't know any of these things. It helped that no one really reminded me of these things,at least to my face . No matter how low my self esteem was I was going to try extra hard to disguise those feelings from everyone else. If people know what makes you tick they can potentially use those weaknesses against you, so I disguised a lot of my sorrow with bravado so that I could protect myself psychological, however, the further I ran away from revealing myself to others the closer I got to having to deal with myself. As my acne grew worse and worse, my grandmother would take me to the dermatologist and she spent hundreds of dollars on creams and ointments and none of them worked.
I was really down on myself and had no self confidence. I had a different girlfriend every year of high school so it was obvious that girls saw something in me that would make them want to know more, but whatever those girls saw in me I struggled to see in myself. During freshman year, I found out that the girl who I was after got into a relationship with one of my good friends. I was crazed with anger, but as with everything else I swallowed hard and moved on. I didn’t understand that what I was doing was dangerous. I kept stockpiling heartbreak after heartbreak until finally I was consumed with sorrow and hatred. I wasn’t just dealing with all that had happened in high school, but everything that had happened in my life up to that point, situations and complications that none of my closest friends knew about and would never know about because I didn’t want anyone’s pity. Under this outwardly happy, fun-loving, playful and confident exterior, rested an angry, confused, frustrated, and deeply saddened young man who could never fully express himself because he was afraid that no one could ever understand the depths of his misery.
It wasn’t all bad though, I remember the laughs that I had with my friends and the crazy stuff I used to do. Even that in a way showed how low my self esteem was, I felt I had do crazy things and make an ass of myself to feel like I was cool and accepted, but at the same time I seldom saw anyone else doing the things that I was encouraged to do. In eleventh grade I was more laid back and I dropped the persona that I had developed for myself, it was also my distant lover’s senior year. We had been friends after our first break up, and she told me everything regarding her social life; she wasn’t as open about her personal family life. That year we started to get that old feeling back. We had a good time on the school overnight trips before winter break and going into winter break we were as close as we had ever been. After basketball season was finished I focused more on the relationship that I was trying to have with this girl. With Valentine’s Day approaching. I decided that I wanted to do something that would give her no choice but to fall in love with me.
I knew that she loved Winnie The Pooh and was fond of white chocolate candy, so I had one of her classmates whose family had a chocolate making business get me some white chocolate and then I went and bought her a Winnie the Pooh bear that was about as tall as me. I got balloons and a card and walked in 15 degree temperatures through my neighborhood and to the train station to go to school. I remember getting ridiculed by the other guys in the neighborhood and being looked at funny by people on the train including those who I went to school with, but I didn’t care. I went to her class during the home room period and gave them to her. Her face lit up and it was evident that I had made her as happy as I had always envisioned. The next day happened to be my birthday. When I got to school she gave me a card. When I read the card I felt happier than I had ever felt at any time in my life up to that point. She wrote a letter inside the card saying that she loved me and that she didn’t just want to be friends anymore. We were at the height of our relationship, but we were about to come crashing back down to earth. I found out during her best friend’s birthday party that she had started going out with some guy around the time we were supposed to be talking.
I then descended even further than I ascended on the day she told me that she loved me. It was a crushing blow to my psyche and it damaged our friendship severely. We didn’t talk to each other that much for the rest of the school year and when we did talk it wasn’t pleasant. Left without a date for the junior prom I contemplated not going, but the girl’s best friend asked me to go with her. I don’t know how much of it was pity, how much of it was her really wanting to go with me, and how much of it was her knowing that what her friend did to me was wrong. My grandmother got me a PT Cruiser limousine and when I invited both of the girl’s friends; my date and another of her good friends and failed to invite her, it seemed to create an even greater chasm in our relationship.
She blamed me for ruining her prom during our dance after she was voted prom queen and I was voted prom prince. I really didn’t know what she expected me to do, how could’ve I invited her and the guy that she chose over me to ride in the limo with me and how awkward would it have been if I had. I tried to make amends at her graduation. I got her a card congratulating her for graduating and I wrote her a letter talking about how I felt about her and our relationship over the last four years, but after that we really didn’t talk until the following winter. Going into my senior year I had to adjust to the girl of my dreams not being around anymore. I got over it after awhile and went on with my life. I went thru my senior year and things were alright. During a basketball game in Jersey City, N.J. the girl of my dreams returned. After the game we talked and she leaned in and kissed me, it was cool that we were able to end on a good note and I felt like after that conversation we could rekindle our friendship again. I started filling out college applications in January of 2003. I filled out the applications with the assumption that I would be able to attend school out of state if I was accepted.
I didn’t get accepted to a lot of the colleges that I applied to, but I did get accepted to Liberty University in Virginia. My grandmother who encouraged me to apply to school then told me that she couldn’t afford to pay for me to go. I became livid and my grandmother and I got into an argument. We had gotten into arguments before, but nothing as volatile as that. She kicked me out and told me that I had to stay at my other grandmother’s house. This all occurred with three months left in my senior year of high school. I thought about that argument a lot and I apologized to my grandmother because she has always been there for me and she did not deserve that from me. I said a lot of things that I shouldn't have and that is something that happened that I truly regretted. Senior prom was fast approaching and that year I was contemplating going by myself whereas last year I contemplated not going at all.
I had a female friend in my class that I had always had a weird relationship with. It was obvious that we liked each other, but we always acted like we couldn’t stand each other. We would make jokes about each other and from the outside looking in we had the prototypical brother/sister relationship. It never became more because of my infatuation with the “dream girl” during previous years. I saw that during those years she had grown tired of hearing about the “dream girl”. She told me after we agreed to go to the senior prom together that she always gave me signals, but I never picked up on them because I was chasing the “dream girl” and pursuing other girls. If me and this surprise lover were only meant to make magic for one night we did and it was the best night of my life at that time. I picked her up in a Jaguar limousine. My maternal grandmother outdid herself from the previous year when she got me a PT Cruiser limo. My grandmother went out of her way to make me feel like a king that night I’ll always remember and appreciate her for that. I won the prom prince in my junior year, but that accomplishment and that night was ruined by the drama that had taken place between me and the “dream girl”. There were rumblings that I would win the prom king this time around and after receiving unanimous votes from everyone who attended I won the prom king.
I down played the award, but deep down it meant a lot to me. My date and I left a little after midnight and instead of trying to find a party to go to we stayed together. I put on some slow music in the limousine as we drove and told her I how I felt. She thanked me for showing her a great time. She looked at me and I looked at her and we began to kiss. It got hotter and heavier and we embraced all the way to her house. I wanted to come in, but she said her mother would be back soon. I went back home thinking that I had just experienced the greatest night of my young life. The only thing that I regretted going into graduation was that I never picked up on the signals that my “surprise lover” showed me. I began feeling like she was the one that I should have been trying to pursue, but with her going away to Temple it was too late.
We talked and she explained that to me, but I didn’t want to understand; I had once again lost a chance with someone really special. I bought her favorite flowers on my way to graduation. I didn’t get a ride to graduation, I caught the train instead like I always had when I went to Hoboken. I wore a shirt with my mother’s picture on it and some jeans to graduation. I wore it as a reminder of how far I had come and I wore it because I knew she wouldn’t be able to attend and I wanted to see her there. The time I spent in high school was confusing, frustrating, saddening, heartbreaking, fun, memorable, and beautiful; I wouldn’t go back and change a thing.

draft/ essay one

vv


My mother was murdered. That is all I have been thinking for 13 years after my father made it official. You watch television shows and read newspaper articles about people being murdered, but it never hits home for people who haven’t directly experienced the pain, anger, guilt, confusion, and unspeakable sorrow that is attached to such a tragedy. You watch the news and almost become detached from the reality and finality of death. You become detached from the idea that when an anchorperson delivers news about death and murder that these are real people with real families.
When that anchor person says, “in other news”, we as viewers are taught to move on just as quickly. We fail to comprehend that we are all part of the same human family and that these aren’t just people who are murdered every day, but mothers, brothers, sons, aunts, uncles, daughters, and fathers. My mother was murdered and my father turned to drugs to cope. He was the prime suspect in my mother’s murder as most spouses are in a murder investigation in which the victim is married. I guess it is just assumed that some sort of domestic dispute lead to that persons murder if they have a husband or wife.
My father explained to me that he and my mother had been arguing a lot and had gotten into some physical altercations after she admitted that she had cheated on him with another man. He told me that they had just settled their differences the same day she was murdered. My father said that my mother told him that she loved him before she walked my uncle’s girlfriend to the bus stop; that was the last time any of us saw her alive. Her and her friend were stabbed over 70 times and left to die on the rooftop of an abandoned building. Penny Eudora Fant died wearing a locket that had our pictures inside. It was never made clear to me exactly what my mother was involved in or who she was involved with that would have wanted to inflict that kind of harm to her or what she could have possibly done to warrant such aggression. I’ve gotten stories from my uncles that my mother had been involved in drug dealing. One of my uncles who is not alive now told me that one time when he worked for a limousine company that he went to visit my mother and when he came into the house she had shoeboxes of money in the closet.
My mother stole to provide for our family. We were very poor and sometimes she had to do what she had to do for us to have what we needed. My father told me that she went to jail in 1986 for robbery or shoplifting and was not the same person when she returned, he believes that someone on the inside lured her into the drug game and then made threats against her life, and the lives of her family members which would include me, my father and the rest of my family. My father told me that a few months before she was murdered she tried to overdose on medication. She kept screaming at him, “ I can’t let anything happen to the family, I don’t want anything to happen to you or Elliott”. The woman she was with whose name was “Betty” was my uncle’s girlfriend. It was determined that she had nothing to do with the murderers or with that situation, she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I died with my mother and her friend that night. My ability to trust, my ability to love entirely, my happiness and contentment and my faith in people were all shattered in a way that I cannot fully describe, in short, by the time I was 12 years old I was no longer a child, but a prisoner of circumstance that had suffered through more hardship than people 4 times my age. After years of eating from this plate of life the worst thing began to happen to me; I became used to it. My earliest memories were ones of ignorance, knowing halfway what I should have known entirely. Having the feeling that I was always on the outside looking in as it pertained to circumstances that were to have a profound impact on my childhood existence, my adolescence and my development as a man. I still struggle with how I feel to this very day about the Hillside police reopening my mother’s case, because I don’t know how I would react if they found my mother’s killers, I don’t know if I’d kill the people who killed my mother. My family; my maternal grandmother in particular, just wanted me to be happy. She seldom spoke about my mother and on the occasion that she does she only chooses to talk about the things that my mother would do around Christmas time and the good memories that she had from my mother’s adolescence. My maternal grandmother would omit things that happened around the period of her death even as I became older and more ready to understand what was going on.
I was upset at her for not trying to help me understand more about my mother. I was upset with my father for having become addicted to drugs, but as with my grandmother and the rest of my family how could I have known what it was to be in their position. What did I know about being accused of my wife’s murder or being the mother, sister, aunt, uncle or grandmother to a 21 year old woman who’s murder was one of the worst murder mysteries in the history of Hillside, N.J. I remember moving around a lot as a kid, moving from ghetto to ghetto with the rest of my family trying to find a place to call home. Every time I would become settled and find new friends to get into trouble with, it was time to move again. I moved from Hillside, to Plainfield, to Newark, to Irvington, and back to Newark in a period of five years. I remember it being 1993 and my family moving to Chelsea avenue in Newark, N.J.
My first real recollection about drug selling and drug use was set in motion by my grandmother’s boyfriend who had a team of drug peddlers selling crack cocaine, heroin and angel dust off of our porch steps while my grandmother was off at work. He and my uncle used drugs in the house. Cops raided our house for drugs on a few occasions and when my grandmother found out what he was involved in and that other dealers in the neighborhood was threatening his life, she bought him a plane ticket to Oregon and ended their relationship. My mother doesn’t have a tombstone on her grave until this very day because he messed up the money that my grandmother wanted to use to purchase it with. I wondered at nine years old what those little bottles with the colorful tops were that I kept finding peppered in with the leaves in our backyard and crushed into broken glass along the street pavement. In the years to come I would find that the demons that hid in these little bottles and in those tiny slips of aluminum foil would take countless members of my community and several members of my family away in ambulances, or police cars via drug distribution or drug use from the 1980’s on through the 90’s.
When my paternal grandmother found out what was going on at the house she insisted that I come to live with her. My maternal grandmother agreed because she worked really late nights and there was no one that she felt comfortable with supervising me from the time school ended until the time she got home at 12:00am, so towards the end of my 2nd grade year I moved to East Orange, N.J. with my paternal grandmother. The neighborhoods weren’t all that different in terms of what went on outside; the robberies, gang violence, drug selling and drug use were commonplace in all of the surrounding neighborhoods from Orange, N.J. all the way through Newark. What was different was what went on in the house.
It was only me and my grandmother living together in East Orange, as opposed to the 10 people who lived with me when I lived with my other grandmother. With my paternal grandmother I was always properly looked after, I ate everyday, showered everyday, and did my homework. My paternal grandmother didn’t always give me everything that I wanted materially, but she gave me everything that I really needed. She gave me discipline, and security. I remember her turning on the radio to the jazz station CD 101.9 and having me help her clean the entire house on Saturday mornings before she went to the grocery store; things that I hated doing back then, but that I am appreciative for right now.
I still was consumed by anger as a youth, and that feeling only heightened in my dealings with other youth from the neighborhood. I was teased and made fun of for being one of the few children whose parents made them adhere to the uniform policy in sixth grade. It didn’t help my cause to have a double barrel Euro Sport book bag that was just as big as me. When I would walk home from school, kids from our rival neighborhood would follow me home and kick my book bag and taunt me as they followed me home from school most days. I remember them surrounding me on Church Hill where my friends and I played football. As I looked at one member of the group another member punched me in the face and then they jumped me.
When I got home I went under my grandmother’s bed and grabbed her handgun and vowed to myself that I was never again going to be a victim. I put the gun back where I found it, but I had every intention at 12 years old of shooting the next person that thought they were going to bully me. To avoid being put in that position again, I took a longer way home from school, not because I feared these kids, but out of fear of my own anger. I had no self esteem when I was young. I remember walking home with a friend and running into a couple of girls. My friend asked one of them to talk to me and she said, “ I’m not talking to him, he’s ugly, look at all those bumps on his face.”, I couldn’t remember a time in my childhood when I was more hurt and embarrassed. I always heard what that girl said to me in my mind. It echoed loudly at night, almost like the girl was in the room with me. I sometimes wondered if she would’ve been as mean to me if she knew my story, then I thought that I wouldn’t have wanted her pity at the expense of her honesty.

After seventh grade, my grandmother decided to have me enrolled in a program called, “ A Better Chance”. It was a program designed to take those who qualified academically out of the inner city public schools and place them in “more accelerated” college prep schools. I took several stances against the viewpoint that my grandmother’s shared about sending me off to finish middle school and high school in Hoboken, N.J., a place that I had never heard of in my entire life. I didn’t understand why my grandmother wouldn’t even allow me to finish 8th grade at the school that I was attending and I was against it, especially after me and my grandmothers visited the school, but oddly enough it turned out to be one of the most important experiences of my life to date.
I grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods throughout my life and if I or anyone in our neighborhood saw white people either they were cops or they were people who we saw in passing who we thought were just lost. I wasn’t exposed to white people or even Hispanic people a lot when I was young, not because me or my family had any animosity toward those or other groups, but because that was just the habitat of where I grew up. Going to the Hudson school in Hoboken taught me how to adapt to new scenery, new ideas, and new cultures and people, those experiences opened the door to a whole new world of perspective. I caught the train on my own for the first time in 1998 on my first day at this new school. On my second day while traveling home, I met what I thought was the prettiest girl I had seen up to that point in my life.
When she smiled it was like the sun was shining indoors. I remember how high I felt after she said yes when I asked her to be my girlfriend a few months later and how low I felt when she dumped me two weeks after that. High school was a blurred vision stock piled with the good, the bad, and the ugly of adolescence. I realized by the time I had graduated that this distant love that took my heart while in high school took my common sense as well, but I didn’t feel too bad because that is a commonality in all love stories.
My senior prom was perfect and a far cry away from my junior prom where I was crowned prom prince, but could not fully enjoy the moment because of how my friendship had crumbled with the girl I loved. After she graduated in 2002, I realized that I didn’t really take the time to get to know her the way I should’ve, and that if I didn’t truly know her then my love for her was actually for a representative. I found someone that I took the time to get to know over the years as a friend and she accompanied me to the senior prom. I was recognized as the prom king, I had the nice limo, and a pretty girl on my arm and for the first time in my life I felt like life wasn’t all that bad. The night culminated perfectly, but it was then that I realized that she was the one that I should’ve been chasing all along and that with graduation one week away and her going to Temple I lost four years in which I should’ve been trying to establish more of a bond with her.
Just before graduation, I wrote a poem/memoir illustrating my life experiences up to the point that I wrote the poem. Some people were moved to tears when I read it in class and some were just astonished because they didn’t have any idea about what I had been through in my life. The poem is called “regrets”. I keep it in my wallet until this day to remind me of the first time that I addressed my personal sorrow through a poem. I had been writing poetry since the early part of my adolescence, but never about my own personal grief. Writing always proved to be the best therapy when I was upset, sad, or indifferent. On graduation day I wore a shirt with my mother’s wedding picture on it to remind me just how far I had come and to remind me that there was so much more that I had to do.
A few months before graduation I moved out of my paternal grandmother’s apartment in East Orange and moved back in with my maternal grandmother in Elizabeth. This happened after an argument that I had with my paternal grandmother about making me fill out college applications and then saying that she could not help me pay to attend once I was accepted to an out of state college. I felt that she shouldn’t have had me waste my time applying to colleges if she knew there was no way she could help me pay to go to those colleges. She took me to take a placement exam for Union County College, I was accepted and I attended UCC for one year before I decided to go to the U.S. Navy.
My decision to go into the military was a decision that I made out of frustration over my job and school situation. I was accepted to a four year school, but I couldn’t afford to go and I didn’t have a good paying job so I thought to myself that it would be beneficial for me to go. I could make some money , see the world and come home as a veteran of the armed forces. Things didn’t work out in the military and I returned home after a few short months to find that there were no jobs that were willing to hire me. My friend had to get me a job working as a janitor in a grocery store.
After performing militaristic duties I was now mopping up aisles, cleaning up spills, and being paid very little to do so. I decided that I had to get back into a four year school. I applied to Kean University in April of 2005 and began as a freshman in September of 2005. Today I am senior at Kean University and preparing for graduation in May of 2010. I have repaired my relationship with my father. One night during my freshman year he came to my grandmother’s house and sat down with me. We stayed up until morning. He talked to me about my mother, his drug addiction and the experiences he had as a member of that world. He came clean about everything. He told me that he and mom used to get into fist fights and that they had a really bad fight when he found out that she cheated on him. It was the first real conversation that we ever had and it went along way in repairing things between us. I hated my father for a long time because I was embarrassed by his addiction. My father is like Superman to me and it hurt me a lot to find out that he had those kind of shortcomings. It hurt me when he would tell me that we were going to go play basketball or catch and he would never show up.
It has taken my father almost twenty years, but he finally has the look of someone who has put their life back together again, at least on the surface. I’m sure a lot more work has to be done to fully heal himself internally. It has taken me a long time to repair myself emotionally. I am still fighting with rage and anger. At 24 years old, I am still on a journey where I am not sure of the destination. All I know is that what was once a fight for survival is now a fight to succeed, I am prepared for the next round.

photograph/ my mother's wedding day

I have a tattoo on my left arm of my mother. The picture is from her wedding day. The significance of this picture is that it was taken a couple of years before her murder. The picture itself shows her in her wedding gown smiling. The picture doesn't have any color, but her smile lights up the picture and when I look at it it's like the sun is shining indoors. What happened after the wedding and after that picture was taken that my mother is not with me now? The frustration of not knowing the whole story behind her downward spiral pains me and makes me emotionally inconsolable. When something of this magnitude happens and it impacts your life in such a way as it has impacted mine I feel like you should at least know why. All I know is a picture. A picture that depicts a happy bride on a happy day in her life and every time I look at this picture I'm conflicted with emotion. I see it and I smile, I see it and I'm perplexed, I see it and I become upset, because when someone is taken in the manner that my mother was taken you don't imagine a time in the same proximity where they can be as happy and carefree. The wedding and her murder weren't ten years apart, they were within a few years of one another and thats what confuses me. Nevertheless, when I look at my left arm and when I look at her picture I see her smiling at me. I feel her presence and I hear her saying, "it's ok son, live your life and take care of the family", the smile that she flashes in that picture is like armor that I take into this cruel world everyday and it's like a warm embrace I will always be a part of.

Past Artifacts and the stories behind them

I can be a pack rat at times so I could tell a thousand stories about materials that I may find if I were to go through my closet and storage boxes. I remember going through one of my old storage containers and finding one of my old notebooks that was issued to me in the Navy. I use to poetry in it and use it as a journal while I was in boot camp. I wrote a lot of poetry that I ended up selling to some guys so that they could give it to their girlfriend back home. I actually made a killing off of the poetry that I wrote in that journal. Guys were paying me twenty dollars per poem which I thought was nuts, but I wasn't going to tell them that. My inner most thoughts that were expressed in those books were respected enough by my peers that they actually wanted to pay me to give them to there girlfriends', Wow!! I still can't believe that even after five years. I completely forgot about that notebook, I actually found it trying to find another notebook that I needed for one of my classes. Remembering that notebook reminded of a time during boot camp that wasn't so bad, because it was an intense experience for the most part. The notebook was one of many funny experiences that i recall from that time and when I skimmed through the book again I realized that a lot of the stuff that I dismissed as just being scribble weren't bad poems and it made me wonder what those girlfriends said or did to those boyfriends once they returned home or if any of those guys confessed that they did not write the poems; probably not.

narrative: what and how I decided to revise

I decided to shorten the first essay. there was any content that I thought shouldn't have been in the essay, but the essay was ten pages long and had to be made more concise. So I tried to find parts in the first essay that I thought were a little long winded and chop those parts down a tad. This was difficult for me because I thought that I needed everything that I inserted into the essay in the first place. I even thought that I didn't do justice to the period just after I finished high school, because a lot went on during that time in my life as well. y I didn't thoroughly address my experiences in the military. There were things that went on in boot camp that you couldn't imagine unless you were there and I really didn't do justice to the experiences that I had in boot camp. I don't know, I don't know exactly how to go about minimizing my first essay, but I do know that it needs to be more concise. The essay was supposed to be five pages and I doubled that amount with my essay. I guess when you are telling the story of you life and your experiences you don't want to misrepresent any information and you want to be thorough and accurate in every depiction. Either this is the precedent or I am just that much of a perfectionist. In any case this has been a good experience writing this essay, I haven't had this much fun with a writing assignment ever! with the exception of my poetry

Post a focus/ essay 2

I wanted to really get into my adolescence in this essay. I am a firm believer that those years lay the foundation for what we choose to become in our adulthood- it is the awakening of our sense of self. There is no greater forum for discovering that than high school. I wanted to talk about the joy, the pain, the confusion, and every emotion that comes along with the territory of a being a teenager. I wanted to talk about first love and first heartbreak. The highs and lows of both scenarios have been there for me and I wanted to talk how those experiences made me feel and how they have shaped the man I have become. I wanted to talk about the innocence of adolescence, the college application process and the pressures that teenagers of today have to face. I have had great moments and moments that have made me feel terrible, but all of it is for the better. I wanted to give my perspective on what is the most confusing, horrible and wonderful times in anybodies life and I wanted to do it by opening up about what I went through in and out of high school as a teenager.

what I could better on my next draft/ what I liked

I really didn't see any glaring problems with my draft. If I had to point out any thing that I would change I would probably try to make my essay a little more concise. I told the story of my life and in order to effectively do so I had to address all of it thoroughly. In doing that I lost any one particular focus, I poured out my heart on to this assignment and I liked that I could finally talk every thing that has happened to me in my life. It is a major relief to tell my story. This deep sorrow has kept me from opening up the way that I've have wanted to so in writing this essay a major weight has been lifted off of my chest.