Just this afternoon my husband and youngest daughter helped me tidy up the yard. I was then able to spend the rest of the evening swinging my infant son on the children's playset that we have. I looked across our small, tidy yard and listened to the laughter of my children, and felt peace for the first time in weeks. When life becomes stressful or overwhelming, I find myself more and more working outside with my children. Whether it be planting a garden, tending to the animals, or simply cleaning the yard I find immense pleasure from working in the fresh air alongside my children. Once the work is done and it is time to relax, there is a feeling of accomplishment and serenity that comes with it. It is then that I can truly be present in life and completely unplugged from the world and enjoy myself. This is where I find pleasure in life, outside with my family, working with and improving what is ours. We are in our own little world without any distractions and completely focused on the task at hand. I find myself unable to find anything that brings me more pleasure in life than that.

I was always the Angel Tree child, I was once the homeless child taken in and given a completely new wardrobe, even though it was all two sizes too big. I was given a new home and a new family. I survived in my poverty-stricken home by the grace of others who wanted to help, who wanted to give selflessly. I was able to learn compassion for others through these strangers. It is my goal in life to one day be able to do the same for others. I have told many people in the last few years that I do not measure the success of life by my income or my materials. I measure my success in life by knowing that I can help others as I was once helped. As of right now, I have been able to help other parents provide small birthday parties for their children who wouldn’t have had one otherwise. I have been able to buy groceries for hungry families in need. Although these are small things, I who have been on the receiving end of these very things, know that at the moment they seem like miracles. In those miracles come hope, hope that things will get better. One day I will be successful enough in life to help those around me in both these small ways and on a larger scale. I dream of sponsoring at least one family every Christmas. I dream of becoming a scholarship donor myself one day. As for now though, I am an undergraduate studying for a Business degree and will continue to help give in the small ways that I can, because even the smallest acts give hope for the future.

Financial freedom is the very thing that I strive for. I do not aim for a six-figure income, I do not aim for a huge house and fancy cars. Financial freedom to me is having the ability to pay all of my bills in the same week as I register my daughter for softball. Financial Freedom to me is owning a home that is big enough for our family of five, with enough land to allow my children to explore, learn from, and grow safely on. Financial freedom to me means having the ability to help others who are struggling to better their lives. This is the very reason that I chose to pursue a business degree as a mother of four at the age of twenty-four. My husband and I have worked hard to get where we are in life. We started in a government rent assisted apartment with nothing but a mattress on the floor for ourselves and a toddler bed and playpen for our daughters. We now live in a two-bedroom mobile home that we are quickly outgrowing, our bills are paid, and our pantry is never empty. But when the school sends home announcements for things as simple as Ugly Christmas Sweater Day or as expensive as softball registration we have to take that bill money and designate it for something else. We never want to stop our children from being included and exploring their interests, but it often starts a domino effect of picking and choosing bills and playing a game of catch-up. I know that one day we will not have to worry about how we will pay our bills because our children have dreams of their own. As I stated before, we have a large family in a very small home. We rent from a man who we have never spoken to, we try to be as creative as we can in finding ways to organize all of our things, and my children spend their time outside confined to a very small area in the backyard that I can see out of my window as our neighbors are less than trustworthy. To be able to provide my children with a room of their own and enough land to explore and simply play properly on is one of my biggest goals in life. They want to raise chickens, goats, and of course a pony. If I were to be able to provide them with the type of life that they want and more importantly deserve, I would be perfectly content in life. But if I had the financial freedom to provide my family with the life that they deserve and the ability to do whatever I wished, I would not wish for a condo on the beach or a brand new car off the lot. I want to sponsor a family for Christmas that will put off paying rent for as long as they can in an attempt to make sure that Santa visits their children. I want to help provide a scholarship to someone who is aiming for a better life for themselves but do not know how they are going to accomplish it. Financial Freedom to me means providing my family with the life that they deserve and the chance to explore and chase every dream or interest that they have. Financial freedom to me means helping others achieve the same life goals for themselves. It’s as simple as being able to buy my children new socks as I see that they are outgrowing the ones that they have.

Three years ago I was starting over. I had just left an abusive relationship and moved myself and two young daughters back into my mother's house. My three-year-old and I shared an air mattress on the living room floor and my one-year-old slept in a playpen at our feet. It was a very tight squeeze as five people already lived in the three-bedroom mobile home. My mom, stepdad, my two younger sisters, and my baby brother. Can you imagine the love it took to allow me to move back home when you were dealing with a rebellious teenager, a four-year-old, and a three-year-old? With so many young children in the house, it was hard to move without tripping over someone. I remember when my mom came to me with the idea to allow the younger children to go spend the weekend with an aunt to give us some breathing room and a chance to run some errands without the extra bodies in tow. I reluctantly agreed even though the only place that I had ever allowed them to spend the night was at their grandmother's house. But she was coming to me requesting a kid-free weekend because her nerves of steel were failing, she needed a break. And after all that she had done for us, I was willing to do that. As plans were made my sisters had found other relatives to stay with that weekend leaving only my three-year-old brother and my daughters going to their great aunt's house. I could not shake the feeling of unease that came with allowing them to stay with someone who I only really knew through birthday parties and holiday events. So I decided to break down and contact my ex and ask him if he and his family wanted to take the girls for the weekend. They agreed. That weekend my brother died in a house fire. The adults had stepped out to the neighbor's house and an electrical fire had started. Three-year-old Anthony died alone with a puppy curled into him. I have put off writing this essay for weeks, my heart is breaking as I write these words now. I have struggled with his death in many ways and feel as if I truly am to blame. If I had not moved back home with my children, the house would not have been crowded. If the house was not crowded Anthony would not have been sent to our aunt's house. And had he not been sent to our aunt's house, he would have walked the field as a kindergarten graduate with my daughter two days ago. The thought that if I had sent my daughters with him puts me to my knees. Losing Anthony has been a terrible event that I still struggle with almost three years later. But if I had lost him and both of my daughters? There would be no way to come back from that, I would not be here today, writing this. It is one thing to know that accidents can happen, it’s another altogether when you have experienced those accidents. Your world gets smaller. You see the danger in leaving a phone charger plugged in when not in use or the need to dump the six inches of water out of the kiddy pool when you go inside even if that means you have to refill it again in an hour. The fears and anxiety I have resulting from my brother's death have become crippling. My children do not leave me, for any reason. When my daughter began school last year I lived in a constant state of anxiety, I had to have my phone in my hand at all times in case the school were to call. If the school bus was more than two minutes late to drop her off I would begin hyperventilating. My world had become so small that it was affecting my children's social and emotional growth. Because of this, I am fighting to get through it. I am starting the journey to pursue higher education and in itself take a step back from hovering over them and instead finding a way to improve their lives. I carry Anthony with me daily but in fear and guilt. I want to fight to get through this so I can remember him as he was. A beautiful shy boy who was entirely too good for this world.

Mental health issues run rampant in my family, both of my parents have multiple diagnoses that they have both passed down to me. Despite my fathers issues, he tried very hard to raise my brother and I. My mother unfortunately went the other way, and allowed her mental health and drug abuse to not only destroy our relationship but to cause a relationship to be nonexistent. Nature versus nurture had my hands tied both ways. Due to the genetics I received from them and the way that their mental health influenced their parenting abilities, I in turn have compiled a laundry list of diagnoses that never seem to fit just right. Because of this and my age, I live in fear that all of my symptoms will combine to present my biggest fear. That I have inherited the scariest of them all from my father, schizophrenia. When I call my father on the phone, I wait to hear his tone of voice to know what type of conversation is to be expected. Most days he is joyful, others seem bitter and hateful. They call this early onset dementia and they tell me that it is only going to get worse. During my childhood there were other scary words, such as Major Depressive and Schizophrenic, which to me meant that I could not make loud noise that would disturb my father. Every morning when he woke, he was a strange and scary man. After a morning dose of medication and two cups of coffee we were allowed to begin walking through the house or to go outside and play. He was very aware of his illness and did his best to keep it under control. My father always took his medication as prescribed and when we all began to notice that it no longer helped as it should, he would ask for either the dosage to be changed or a new medication to replace it. This man worked hard for his mental health issues to not interfere with his life, he coached every sport team and participated in the P.T.A. As a mother myself with her own mental health issues, I can now see how emotionally and mentally draining it can be at times. I will forever be grateful knowing how much work he put into being a good father. On the other hand my mother who struggles with only one, but very complex mental health disorder found it too hard to be a parent. Her Bipolar Disorder presented with severe symptoms that were too hard to understand as a young child. Her lack of mothering skills can not be solely blamed on her chemical imbalance though, because unlike my father she never made an attempt to stay properly medicated or put the effort into the everyday tasks that consist of parenting. I can not recall a single time that she cooked dinner, or even woke me for school. However, I do remember many times in elementary school when I had to cut knots out of the back of my own hair because the woman who was meant to teach me to care for it instead chose to self medicate and was too high to brush my hair for weeks at a time. She struggled with impulse control and the few times that she worked outside of the home, she always became involved in sexual affairs. After many years of watching the toxic cycle of drug abuse, affairs, and mental breakdowns my brother and I went to our father and told him that we wanted her to leave the house. We were in our early teens and could no longer take the insanity that she brought into our lives. I have tried many times throughout my life to reconcile with her, but when I saw the same pattern begin to emerge in her relationships with my own daughters I refused to allow the same hurt to be inflicted on them. Because of this she has no knowledge of my son. I myself have become a strange mixture of the two. I have been told that I have a severe anxiety disorder and am Manic Depressive which is the new way to say Bipolar. Neither of my diagnoses seems to exactly fit due to the fact that they leave out some key issues, that I often struggle with delusions and O.C.D. type behavior. When I have episodes where the two mix, I spend the entire day obsessively cleaning my house. I will sweep the ceiling, clean the walls, scrub the floors and reorganize every surface. Because of these important symptoms, I live in fear that I will one day have my first psychotic break that results in a schizophrenic diagnosis. I am very aware of my own mental health issues but also of my predisposition to drug abuse. I am a mother of three beautiful children who need me to be the best mother that I can be, and although I like to manage without medication, when I find my parenting abilities struggling without it I do seek out help and a prescription for an antidepressant. I struggle with any family relationships that do not reside directly under my roof, and my own mental health frightens me to a point that some days are spent analyzing it to an obsessive degree. But I am a mother, and I wake my daughter for school every morning and put her on the bus. I brush their hair every night, and I put all of my energy into making each day productive, stable, and enjoyable for all three of my children. Many days I fail at this, as every mother does and on those days I try not to blame my own chemical imbalance. I lay down at night and tell myself that they deserve better, and I will do better for them the next day.

I grew up in a home filled with drug abuse and mental health issues. My parents were unfit to care for children and yet my brother and I were only removed from the home once as small children after my father shot a gun off in the home with us in it. Our parents were toxic for each other, and they were not motivated to better their lives or ours. They separated once my brother and I, who were then young teenagers went to our father and told him that we would no longer put up with the things that went on in our lives. Once our mother left, my father's alcohol dependency worsened. He moved us in with a woman who would lock me in my room at night because she said that I ate too much and was fat. I decided to move across the state of Alabama to live with my mother to escape that. Due to her drug addiction and lack of parenting skills, I soon began abusing drugs as well. From eighth grade until my sophomore year, I was alone. I was angry at my father for what he put me through, and my mother who did not work was often away from the house for weeks at a time "hustling'' for drug money. To this day that term makes my blood pressure rise. I remember my last holiday with her. It was Christmas Eve, and I was thrilled that she and her boyfriend were spending more time at home. It was beginning to be a daily event of seeing her and I was using the money I made on weekends to buy little trinkets for their stockings. She had told me that they were leaving to go to a Christmas party, and I began to feel the excitement fade, knowing that she was going to get high and forget to return in time to celebrate Christmas. She informed me that if I were to hear an explosion under no circumstances was I to call 911, but I had to leave the house. I remember thinking that was a strange request for a fifteen-year-old who had no access to a vehicle to leave in. Once she left, I realized why she was in a celebratory mood and why she had been spending so much time at home. Everything came into focus, the parade of strange people in and out of the home, the money to buy herself things. She was cooking and selling meth out of our home. I had been so distracted by my own growing pill addiction I could not see what was happening in front of me. I began to realize how alone and stuck I was that night. I was enraged at life itself and the hand that I had been dealt. And even more so that while I was spending every dime that I had to fill their stockings, they never once thought to get me so much as a piece of candy. After that Christmas, I stayed sober and began to search for a way out of that life. My husband and I have been able to provide our family the only thing that I ever wanted for them, a safe and stable home. Now that those needs are met, I have my eye set on something else for our family, financial stability. I want to improve all of our lives through higher education. I want the man who works himself to the bone for us to have the opportunity to enjoy his life and not simply work it away. I want to provide our children with the ability to chase every dream and interest that they have. I crave the simple things in life, a home that we can fit in comfortably, a yard big enough to plant a garden, and a successful career. I believe that I can achieve this through higher education. I am not the type of person who uses her childhood as a crutch. I use it as an example of what I do not want my children to ever have to endure. They deserve so much more; they deserve the world.

My biggest motivation to pursue higher education is to break the cycle of generational poverty that I grew up in. My one and only goal in life is to live a happy and comfortable life with my family. Although my children have everything that they need, I want the simple things for my family that others take for granted. My husband and I dream of a home of our own that can comfortably fit our family of six. And most importantly I want to ease the load on my husband who works so hard for us. I am not a young high school student who has years of language arts or even basic algebra fresh in her mind, but I do have the dedication and drive to make these next four years the most successful ones of my life so far. I am a mother of a soon to be kindergarten graduate who has been testing out of her grade level since the second nine weeks, a pre-k student with an S.A.T. vocabulary better than mine, an eager little sister of the two who can already count to thirty but is struggling with her colors, and a beautiful three-month-old son who is hitting milestones way too quickly. My children deserve the chance to thrive and if I must throw myself into debt for the next twenty years to give them that I will. But I’m hoping that with as much Federal Student Aid and scholarship money that I can receive, that I can shorten that by a few years so I can begin paying on loans for their own higher education. I want my children to have everything that they deserve out of life. They deserve to have the freedom to explore all their interests whether it be school sports, student government, or the arts. When we begin shopping for prom, I don’t want my daughters plagued with the thoughts of having to choose a dress that we can afford. Instead, I want her full attention on her special night, a memory in the making as we find the perfect dress specifically for her. When my son finds the courage to ask out a girl for the first time, I don’t want his date to be spoiled over the fact that I can’t help him out with popcorn and drink money for the both of them. I don’t want fame and fortune; I don’t want a big house. What I do want is a simple life, a career, and financial freedom. I want a home bigger than the two-bedroom trailer that we have now with a yard big enough to plant a garden. I want my husband and me to have the opportunity to grow in life and eventually retire. Even more than all of that, I want to be able to buy my kids new shoes when they need them instead of waiting on payday. I want to better our lives through higher education.

I know that there are hundreds of other students who are in need and deserving of this award. I don’t know what I can say to make myself stand out amongst all the others because in all honesty, I am sure that there are those who are more deserving than me. I do however believe that my family deserves this award. If I were granted this privilege, it would benefit not only me, but them as well. I am a mother of four amazing children, all who deserve a better life than one of generational poverty. Don’t misinterpret, my husband works tirelessly to provide for our family. He is a young man with a broken body. I have watched this man cry in his sleep at night from the stress that the day before has put on his body. And every morning he awakes and does it all over. We have a pantry full of food, our bills are paid, and our children have everything that they need. We have both worked hard to give them a life better than the ones that we had when we were growing up. But when the school sends home sign-up information for sports or the battery goes out on the minivan, there is a feeling of panic and fear. How are we going to find the money to pull this off? Often my husband pawns his own items to make sure that we have what is needed. In doing that he not only puts another bill on his plate but must repurchase something that he has already bought. Honestly, I am so proud of how far we have come in life. We went from having nothing to a home that may be small but is filled with mementos of our life together. What I naively didn’t realize was that we were still living well below the poverty line. My husband works harder than he should have to. He deserves to be able to enjoy his life. It is amazing to watch our children grow into their interests and personalities. They deserve the financial freedom to explore every interest and chase every dream. Therefore, I have chosen to pursue higher education, to do my part to better all our lives. They’re the reason that I am now appealing to you. I may not deserve this award, but they do. I will spend the next four years working hard to ensure I am well prepared to start a career once I finish school. I will do whatever it takes, even if it means taking out student loans to cover the costs that I need to. I am desperately hoping that if I apply to enough scholarships and write enough essays that just maybe I can prevent one more bill from entering our lives. One more bill that we must take on may seem insignificant, but to the man who works so hard for us, it could be the thing that breaks him.

Susan Franklin is an angel sent from above and I mean that in the sincerest way. I met Mrs. Franklin while attending Asbury High School. Although she was never my teacher, that did not stop her from becoming one of the most influential people I would meet in my life. She served active duty in the United States Air Force, but without her telling you this information, you would never be able to guess it from such a respectable and soft-spoken woman. No matter how troubled the student, or hopeless the situation Mrs. Franklin always had a way of shining light on them. Mrs. Franklin works as a Special Education teacher and I must say that the woman has nerves of steel and a heart of gold. She chose to educate children who not only had learning disabilities but emotional limitations and oftentimes impulse control, on top of the normal teenage hormones that cause all of this. Not only that, but she chose to reach out to students beyond her class roster daily. This is how I first encountered this amazing woman. She saw an angry and rebellious little girl in front of her and knew that with the right direction and guidance could grow to become a brilliant and successful woman. The reason that I know this is because that’s the way she sees every student that walks through the doors of Asbury High School. I remember many times that she would come to me in my math class to ask if I needed help with anything and I always did. Her job was to assist a handful of students in that room, and she would always reach out to the other ones that she knew were struggling. I am thankful that she did because I always needed the help. I have since learned that I struggled with an undiagnosed learning disability called dyscalculia, most easily explained as dyslexia but with numbers. If it was not for her patience and willingness to explain the same concept to me time and time again, I would have lost what little hope that I had in myself. Mrs. Franklin was the type of teacher that would go the extra step, she would sit and tell stories of her life with hidden life lessons in them. She reached out to so many students even if they continually tried to shut her down. One of these students I happened to grow up and marry. Almost every time that we reminisce on our school days, one of us manages to bring her up in conversation. Every time it happens, I feel the urge to reach out to her and thank her for all the patience and encouragement that she showed me. When I think back on my high school years, with the hindsight that you hear so much about it makes me cringe. I was disruptive, obnoxious, unreliable and any other word that you can think of to describe a young girl that was acting out at school due to trouble at home. I was never one to fully apply myself because I had given up on my own future. I believed that I would be just another statistic in life, a teenage mother on welfare who never went to college. Mrs. Franklin, through her kind words, showed me that there was an entire world outside of the town so small that it is often swallowed up by the one next to it. Because of this woman I owe all my thanks and praise.

Parenthood. I am raising four children, all with different personalities and some much more strong-willed than I am. There are days when I wonder what in the world made me think that I could shape these young minds, and then I realize that they are in turn shaping me as well. I have become a much better person as each of these sweet and sassy souls has entered my life. They open me up to new experiences on a daily basis. They make my life an adventure every day, a crazy and beautiful adventure.

Mental health issues run rampant in my family, both of my parents have multiple diagnoses that they have passed down to me. Despite my father's issues, he tried very hard to raise my brother and me. My mother, unfortunately, went the other way and allowed her mental health and drug abuse to not only destroy our relationship but to cause a relationship to be nonexistent. Nature versus nurture had my hands tied both ways. Due to the genetics that I received from them and the way that their mental health influenced their parenting abilities, I in turn have received multiple diagnoses that never seem to “fit just right”. Because of this and my age, I live in fear that all of my symptoms will combine to present my biggest fear. That I have inherited the scariest of them all from my father, schizophrenia. When I call my father on the phone, I wait to hear his tone of voice to know what type of conversation is to be expected. Most days he is joyful, others seem bitter and hateful. They call this early-onset dementia and they tell me that it is only going to get worse. During my childhood, there were other scary words, such as Major Depressive and Schizophrenic, which to me meant that I could not make any loud noises that would disturb my father. Every morning when he woke, he was a strange and scary man. After a morning dose of medication and two cups of coffee we were allowed to begin walking through the house or to go outside and play. He was very aware of his illness and did his best to keep it under control. My father always took his medication as prescribed and when we all began to notice that it no longer helped as it should, he would ask for either the dosage to be changed or a new medication to replace it. This man worked hard for his mental health issues to not interfere with his life, he coached every sports team and participated in the P.T.A. As a mother myself with her own mental health issues, I can now see how emotionally and mentally draining it can be at times. I will forever be grateful knowing how much work he put into being a good father. On the other hand, my mother who struggles with only one, but very complex mental health disorder found it too hard to be a parent. Her Bipolar Disorder presented with severe symptoms that were too hard to understand as a young child. Her lack of mothering skills can not be solely blamed on her chemical imbalance though, because unlike my father she never made an attempt to stay properly medicated or put the effort into the everyday tasks that consist of parenting. I can not recall a single time that she cooked dinner, or even woke me for school. However, I do remember many times in elementary school when I had to cut knots out of the back of my own hair because the woman who was meant to teach me to care for it instead chose to self medicate and was too high to brush my hair for weeks at a time. She struggled with impulse control and the few times that she worked outside of the home, she always became involved in sexual affairs. After many years of watching the toxic cycle of drug abuse, affairs, and mental breakdowns my brother and I went to our father and told him that we wanted her to leave the home. We were in our early teens and could no longer take the insanity that she brought into our lives. I have tried many times throughout my life to reconcile with her, but when I saw the same pattern begin to emerge in her relationships with my own daughters I refused to allow the same hurt to be inflicted on them. Because of this, she has no knowledge of my son. I myself have become a strange mixture of the two. I have been told that I have a severe anxiety disorder and am Manic Depressive which is the new way to say Bipolar. Neither of my diagnoses seems to exactly fit due to the fact that they leave out some key issues, that I often struggle with delusions and O.C.D. type behavior. When I have episodes where the two mix, I spend the entire day obsessively cleaning my house. I will sweep the ceiling, clean the walls, scrub the floors and reorganize every surface. Because of these important symptoms, I live in fear that I will one day have my first psychotic break that results in a schizophrenic diagnosis. I am very aware of my own mental health issues but also of my predisposition to drug abuse. I am a mother of three beautiful children who need me to be the best mother that I can be, and although I like to manage without medication, when I find my parenting abilities struggling without it I do seek out help and a prescription for an antidepressant. I struggle with any family relationships that do not reside directly under my roof, and my own mental health frightens me to a point that some days are spent analyzing it to an obsessive degree. But I am a mother, and I wake my oldest daughter for school every morning and put her on the bus. I brush their hair every night, and I put all of my energy into making each day productive, stable, and enjoyable for all three of my children. Many days I fail at this, as every mother does and on those days I try not to blame my own chemical imbalance. I lay down at night and tell myself that they deserve better, and I will do better for them the next day. Then I wake up the next morning with hopes to be the mother that they deserve.

For the majority of my adult life I have worked a second shift job as a gas station attendant. When you work in customer service, you often have a chance to see a side of people that others do not. Most of my customers were regulars who would stop by before work or after their shifts ended, but my favorite were the ones who lived in the area of my store. These customers were not only in daily, but often multiple times a day. I grew to know these people in a way that I didn't even know my neighbors. I cheered their children on to victory as they stopped in for Gatorade before a big game, I saw relationships blossom, and even marriages fail. But there was one woman who stood out the most to me. I was privileged to be one of the first to know that she and her husband had decided to buy a business of their own. I remember the excitement and pure joy she spoke with as she told me how long they had wanted to do this. Over the next year I was told about employee mishaps and vendor changes, I was updated on new menu items and even planned to go work for her at one point in time. But sadly I watched as the excitement began to fade and her joy turned to heartache. Our small talks turned even shorter, I would ask how her day was and I would get one word answers. There came a day in my life where everything seemed to be going wrong. My husband and I both were working long hours on separate shifts trying to get to a point where we could just get ahead of the bills. But no matter how hard we tried, life just kept throwing us curve balls. I remember the feeling of defeat that I went to work with that day, one that only worsened through my shift of rude customers and hateful management. By the time this woman entered the store later that night, I was fighting back tears of despair. As she reached me at the counter she immediately saw and began to question what the cause of it was. I could no longer hold back the tears as I explained to her what was weighing on my heart and mind. When she asked if she could hug me I gratefully accepted. This woman kept her arms around me as she consoled me through a very long and needed cry. She shared with me that their business was going under and that they would soon be losing it, her lifelong dream. She spoke words of encouragement and told me that we would both make it past these hard times in life. Even though her own world seemed to be falling in around her, she took the time to be there for me, to lift me up in a very low moment of mine. I know others may see this as a small thing, but that night it was what I needed most. She took the time to show me compassion and remind me that indeed this one day would all seem insignificant. When she left the store, I felt strangely refreshed and recharged, as if I was able to conquer all of my problems. All from this woman taking the time to comfort a gas station clerk. This act of kindness that she showed, allowed me to find the courage to push through and readied me to take on everything that life had thrown at me.