Significant Life Events
Significant events have shaped me to whom I am today, mostly from school, work, family, life experiences, travel, and history. This paper will discuss three of the most critical events that I have encountered in the past and explain how the instances shaped and impacted me. It was the death of a close family member, having my first child, and getting married.
Losing my mom was an incident that deeply affected me. I had lost my dad at a tender age, so a single mom raised me. It was hard for her, but she managed anyway since she did two jobs. During the day, she was a sales representative at an automobile company, and at night she worked at a waitress in a café. I lost my mom during a one-night shift job where she was mugged and left with significant injuries that she succumbed to. It was tough for me to visit her in the hospital since I did not want to see her that way. Two days later, I got the news from my uncle that she had passed away. The grieving period to me was a tough rock to push. I did not talk to anyone nor attend my mom’s funeral, and all I thought about was how I would survive without her. Now that I was an orphan, I chose to run away from home and got to an out of state college to study sociology. I could not make decisions or choices plainly; neither did I think clearly. The school’s responsibilities were supposed to be attended to, but I cared less, and dysfunction started taking the better part of me. Upon visiting the school clinic to try and get some pills to help me sleep, I was diagnosed with a mental disorder with anxiety and depression cases. Finances to me were another big problem, but after attending several sessions with a therapist, I got much better and became independent.
This instance pushed me out of my comfort zone, and realized that I had to fend for myself. I got a night’s job at a café and did my studies during the day time. As a person now, I am independent and seek help when necessary. I went back later to my mom’s grave and paid my last respects, an occasion that allowed me to have peace with her and let her go.
Getting married to me was a very critical life event that I crossed. Marriage allows someone to grow in selflessness as you are of service to your wife and a lifelong commitment. It is a step that requires a lot of assessment and deciding whether you are ready to do it. At the age, twenty-four, I was ready to get married to a lady I met at a café during my college studies. Things felt quite different because everything changed, and now I had to share bank accounts with my wife, and you do not have alone time, but you should instead figure out how to compromise. Every day gave rise to a new experience, including the best and the ugliest moments in life. This change was hard to process at first with everything else. I fell into an identity crisis without realizing it, and the only question I asked myself was, who am I now? All my habits on the phone changed, no secrets were kept, of which I found it hard to share all my stuff with her.
Marriage has impacted my life in a couple of ways. First, the marriage made me a more forgiving person in general, and that allowed me to relate with all other people peacefully and harmoniously. I had to work harder for my family, which changed me a whole that I was now cautious and shared successes as a family. I was more kind and attentive to my morals, and although my wife became more emotionally stable at first, I did not, but eventually, she helped me through it. All these traits that I acquired from marriage appeared in all other avenues since that was the person I had become and built a very positive image.
The first child, to me, was a very critical occurrence in my life journey. Having the first child for me was something that made my profound confidence grows two times larger. The child made my marriage more potent, and realized that it was not all that bad as it looked. During the pregnancy, the anxiety levels for us were very high that we went for a scan one month earlier. Afterbirth, figuring out how to raise the child, was exciting with my wife’s mom’s help. Although sometimes it was stressful as well since, at every instance, there must be someone with the child, which denied me some alone time at which I could follow up on my things.
This event shaped me into who I am today since it gave me a purpose to work hard and push myself harder than I could go just for my child and my family. Planning and figuring out how to make time to do everything were the key roles that pushed me, and till today they still do.