Cade Reddington Be the Light Scholarship

I sit in my living room, engulfed by the comfort of my couch, when my mother suddenly called me to her room. I think nothing of it because it is usually conversations about school or chores. However, as I make my way into my mothers’ room, she greeted me with a feeling of despair and a face of sorrow. Confusion waves through my body for I know the conversation could not be going in the right direction. I stood frozen, as silence lingered through the air, allowing my mom to be the first to fill the silence. She opened her mouth only to reveal that my best friend had killed himself. The room was loud and my head was banging, as I could hear her repeat those words repeatedly in my head. Without a word, I simply turned around and left out the room in disbelief. I went back to my couch and just then, I began to cry. I cried and cried and cried until the water dried from my eyes and I sat there to think and conjure up what my mother told me. Someone that I have grown up with my entire life, was now gone. Apart from me was gone and for someone that was only 13 years old, it was a lot to carry. I remember every memory I have had with Will, the good and the bad. For a long time, I let his death become the best of me. Not wanting to create new relationships and was scared that if I did, I would somehow ruin it. I closed myself off from the world and I only showed certain parts of myself. For a while that worked, but it did not stop the overwhelming feelings I felt when I thought of Will. However, I had to face my fears head-on; I began to accept that things were not going to change. That Will would not suddenly appear, and my life would go back to normal. I had to accept the fact that I will never be 100 percent okay, and that is okay. I took Will’s death as an opportunity to learn more about the world and myself. I always knew about mental health, but never really had conversations about it. I soon started to delve deep into my mental well-being and learn about what makes me happy and how I can improve my mental health. I became more thoughtful with my words and actions, and I prioritize myself over anything else. Will also made me realize, how much care should go into relationships. I was finally able to understand my peers and the people around me. I am more cautious of the way I act and what I say. Not only am I more cautious but I am simply more aware of the effects of poor mental health. Therefore, I do my best to create a welcoming, loving, and nurturing environment for all people that I meet by being open and honest and allowing people to feel like they can trust me. Since I graduated high school, I want to be able to help and inspire the world by focusing on mental well-being. It is my dream to graduate college with a psychology degree and use that to educate others on mental health. I specifically want to work in the Milwaukee area because I believe that there should be more efforts in helping the people in my community that do not have a voice to speak out about their mental health.

I began identifying the mental health struggles I had and still have to this day in 7th grade. As a person who aspired to have high academic accomplishments, I only saw mental health and the possible struggles with it as a way to hold me back from getting the best marks on my report card. I desired to see a therapist for all of the new feelings and struggles that I seemed to be going through that before, didn't seem to be an issue, but I was dismissed as just going through puberty and being overdramatic. This further sent me into a spiral of bottled up feelings and dismissal of my own mental health. I ignored the signs of anxiety when entering crowds and confronting people when they hurt me. Each time I became depressed by a slight trigger, seemingly out of nowhere, I would cry silently in my room until I could damp a cold cloth on my face so no one would know I was crying. It wasn't until my senior year of high school (less than one year ago) when these struggles would affect my schoolwork that the waves of emotions I was dealing with could be held back no longer. I gained intense anxiety from walking into school, fearing that everyone could see right through me and know how I had just cried that morning. I became desperate to find any solution to my problems so I sought out my high school counselor who first validated the emotions and feelings I was having. Just knowing that I wasn't being too sensitive or weak for wanting help was a huge step. In gaining that little bit of insight, I was able to gain the courage to seek out therapy once again. Just from that little amount of gained knowledge, I was able to convince my family of the necessity for therapy and finally made my first appointment. Just after a few appointments, so many things began to make sense. Although I didn't immediately get better at coping, I could finally put a finger on the different experiences I would deal with daily. Through therapy, I learned the roots of most of my problems and how I could work through them all, both by thinking through them and understanding the physiological cycles and responses that my body will go through to almost keep me in a panicked state. I could also recognize when I started to find myself in one of these self-destructive cycles and work towards avoiding them, possibly by doing a simple exercise such as breathing. From a young age, I desired to be a doctor. There was no other option when people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always saw myself in the operating room, helping fix people in ways they didn't know how to themselves. Little did I know that I could help others in ways that weren't necessarily physical. My interest in how the brain works began when my sister began attending college to eventually work as a psychiatrist. I listened to the information and interesting facts that she would relay back home from an outside perspective, always thinking that it was someone else who had to deal with these problems. After experiencing them myself and gaining a better perspective of how many people also go through similar things, I settled on majoring in psychology to aid and eventually spread awareness to kids like me who need that helping hand, not because they're broken but because they just don't have the full picture.

I've struggled with mental health issues for the majority of my life. As I was growing up, from the outside looking in, I probably seemed like a pretty happy kid to most people. I've always had a bubbly personality with a great passion and care for helping others. Loved ones and strangers alike. In my younger years, I did have my fair share of difficult experiences, to put it simply. My parents got divorced in 2014 and separated when I was 9. That was one of the messiest years of my life. The months leading up to their separation and the events that ensued were the start of my struggles. My dad struggled heavily with alcoholism and the last six months of my parent's marriage were essentially filled with my dad gaslighting me and constantly seeking validation from me, his 9-year-old son. A few months after my parent's divorce, I was sexually assaulted by my neighbor. She was 14 or 15 at the time and came over to our house often because all the kids on the block used to hang out a lot. At the time I was too young to understand how wrong what she was doing to me was, but it seriously affected my mental state. I think it was a big part of why I became distrustful and withdrawn. I went to a little bit of therapy following the divorce but it didn't make a significant impact on me. As I continued to grow up I dealt with social anxiety, trust issues, depression, and some other issues alike. There were ups and downs but the depression was always there even if it wasn't always noticeable. In 2020, following the start of the pandemic and the lockdown, my depression became unbearable. The isolation from my friends and feeling so alone made my depression start to become unbearable. That was the time when I started smoking THC carts to try to make myself feel somewhat okay. When that didn't help I started cutting; sometimes as a way of taking out my feelings, sometimes because I couldn't feel anything, to begin with. Smoking and cutting became a cycle and I stopped keeping up with my grades In 2022, earlier this year during my first semester, a girl I had recently broken up with accused me of sexual assault and spread it around the school everyone hated me and I was getting told to kill myself just walking down the hall. The accusation was false and I was able to prove that by releasing a video of her admitting she lied to ruin my reputation while she didn't know she was being recorded. People slowly started believing me but things became too much and at my absolute lowest point, I attempted to jump off a bridge and was stopped by my girlfriend who called me at the right time. I spent the next week at an inpatient facility for safety and followed that with 2 months of outpatient therapy for 6 hours a day. That treatment completely changed my life and I'm forever grateful for my support team who helped me. At first, we worked on my self-harm tendencies and I haven't hurt myself since the second week I was there. They diagnosed me with MDD, GAD, and ADHD and got me on medications which greatly helped. The ways in which they were able to make such an impact on me are what made me want to pursue social work. I want to work with teens struggling with mental health and provide the help that changed my life.