Math is its own language. And the reason I say that, is because, like any other language, you are able to continually learn just by building up your base knowledge of how it works. And that is exactly the way that my type of learning works. But more importantly to me, math is the one thing in this world that can always be proved right, or proved wrong. It cannot lie, because there will always be an answer to any question, and you just have to put in enough effort to figure out. I prefer it over any other subject because of that, because of its linear way of learning compared to everything else. Math used to be my least favorite subject, because I constantly told myself "This algebra has no use in the real world, when I am ever going to use polynomials?" And eighth grade me thought that way from then until senior year. But then, once I became an automotive technician and started to fall hopelessly in love with the world of engineering and tolerances, I finally understand that everything that I had thought about math was entirely wrong in every way possible. It is the building block of everything that we stand on, and every time I do a deep dive into how exactly something is built and the way that it works, the description always involves math, whether in small quantities, or in massive formulas that I can't even hope to understand, yet at least. But as I pursue mechanical engineering for my bachelor's degree, I hope to change that, and be bale to properly understand what I am looking at, and hopefully use the math that I have learned up to this point to be able to properly design and describe exactly why I do what I do, and the reasons behind the choices that I make in my designs just as well.

Despite only being nineteen years old, I have dealt with numerous mental health issues. Depression, Anxiety, Suicidal Tendencies, Eating Disorders, Anorexia, and mental debilitations that are a part of who I am such as ADHD ruled my life until a year and a half ago, where God had lead me out through the other side. But what I gained the most from all of these struggles, was not personal discovery, and it was not learning how to get through them. After nearly two hundred typed out pages in my own personal notebook, relearning exactly what emotions are and what they feel like and how to deal with them, a person might think I would've figured them out. The answer, whilst close to a yes, is simply a not yet. And it is a not yet, that I don't think I will ever answer, and that does not scare me either. After breaking up with my ex-girlfriend who I was two weeks away from ordering a ring for, and entering my last suicidal stint, she convinced me to try therapy despite how much I had hated it time and time again before. But this time, it was different, not because of anything that she did, but rather, because of what I entered in. This time, I actually WANTED to better myself, and whilst it was for the wrong reasons, I recognized that, the effort that I put into bettering myself, would always come back with results. Today, that constant reminder of the bottomless pit that I dug myself out of thanks to the Lord my God, makes me put my all into everything that I do. But like I mentioned either, that isn't what I think benefitted me the most. For those who do not know about the Christian God, he has a funny, and beautiful habit of taking what the world thinks is a mistake, and a terrible happenstance, and using it for his own purposes. In the middle of my depression, I cursed God and hated him with every fiber of my being, blaming him for everything bad that happened in my life, as many do. But, years later, I can look back and see how many times those experiences that I went through have been able to help others with so many things. I have helped people understand and work through their own sexual assaults because of my own. I have helped people understand mental health and what it means. I have helped people through suicidal thoughts, depression, and anxiety, simply because I can have real empathy with that person from my own experience. And I can tell them there is a light at the end of the tunnel, despite the fact that the light is drowned out by their own closed eyelids, or because they are turning away. Mental health, to me at least, is a personal problem, because for me, it was me turning away any sort of help because I thought so badly of myself, that I couldn't trust that what anyone around me said was true when they praised me, or asked me if I needed help. That lack of self-esteem destroyed many of my relationships, but being able to understand that it is perfectly okay, and normal, to feel your best 100% of the time, and to take things day by day, so acutely has forged me into the stable man that I am today. Before the work I put it, I refused to help anyone but myself, and only thought about myself. Because of that, the only people that have stuck around me from then to now, are the people that could shove my terrible behavior to the side and let me work it out. Despite the drag on their lives that I was then, I can be the reliable person they can turn too in their time of need, time and time again. And that feeling, of helping people in the exact position that you have lived through, is the best feeling on the whole planet.

I remember growing up, and many people considered suicide of students to be a nonissue. I remember when students never heard of these types of things, because it didn't happen as often, or at least, that is what I thought was the case. I grew up though, and I learned that, it wasn't true, and the fact that I was about a quarter of an inch away from being a part of the same statistic that I never heard about, a statistic that I thought was a lot less than what it actually is. For my age group and gender, suicide is the number one leading cause of death, for males aged 15 to 29. Seven hundred and ninety thousand deaths occur worldwide per year, with one in every one hundred deaths being causes by a suicide. It is a rampant problem in today's youth, and I can easily understand why. But I don't want to talk about what I believe is the cause in this essay. Rather, I want to talk specifically about my own experiences, and for that I have to take you back in time to when I was eleven years old, which is when my path with self-deprecation started. When I was eleven years old, I was introduced to pornography for the very first time, and for seven years, it ruled by life. What I wouldn't have realized until nineteen however, is that wasn't the first time that I had dealt with sexualization as a child, as in this past year I learned that I was sexually assaulted at the age of four, still in diapers. Lust ruled every thought I had, and made it hard for me to think when I first learned about what exactly it was, searching up an explicit website for the first time. And I fell into a pit of despair when I was caught watching it at age twelve. When that happened, I remember after getting absolutely beaten, and for good reason, by my mother when I got home, standing above the door to the basement stairs, and thinking heavily about jumping down the stairs, hoping that I would get enough strength, and enough willpower in order to do it, because anything would be better than the looks of disgust that I got from friends and family. Fast forward through COVID, and falling right back into my old ways, I lost most of my middle school friends and forgot how to communicate well enough to make new ones, which lead to my experience with high school becoming one that focused much more on self-hatred instead of self-discovery. Especially when I got my first car, I spent every waking hour thinking long and hard about how worthless I was, and how much I just wanted to end my own life after realizing what that feeling really was four years prior. I inched death away many times, with one of my closest being launching my car off of a bridge at seventy miles per hour, and the first thing I felt was not relief I was okay, but the opposite, especially when I heard from a person nearby, that the year before someone crashed exactly like me, and died after rolling five times into a powerline. And at that moment, I was jealous. I continued hoping that I would have accidentally died, and prayed to a God I didn't believe in yet to give me the willpower to crash into a tree and make it look like an accident, but thankfully, the existence of my sisters prevented that. And here I am.

My biological Father was a United States Marine for nine years, but he was only my father for four years before his own problems with self control led to him divorcing my mother. I do not hear from him very often, but when I do, despite his abandoning of my own family along with my sister, I make sure I make known that I love him still, despite all of the stuff that happened in the past. Love is not a feeling, but it is a choice, and it is a choice that I make towards all the people that I meet. What inspired me the most from him, when I grew up, was resilience. I learned just a small portion of the conditions that went on in Baghdad and Iraq, where he was stationed and fought in, and I also learned a large amount about all of the vehicles that he used in particular. But the thing that has stuck with me the most, knowing about him both then and now about my father, was that sticking to something, and taking responsibility despite just how hard that responsibility might be, is the right thing to do. For a long time, I lived my life in complete opposition of that, and I refused to take accountability for anything that I had done, pushing off every conceivable sin that I had committed to the back of mind; lying, cheating; stealing; fighting; racing; smoking; drinking. I lived my life in opposition of what the military taught, and that was responsibility, in my eyes. Now that I have grown up, and found my faith in Christ, I've come to the realization of just how important taking responsibility for my own actions, and trying my best means for both myself and the people around me. Becoming a more helpful person and being the reliable friend, brother and son to everyone around me-father included-has become one of my favorite aspects of my life. And I can give thanks to my father, for both directly and indirectly teaching me these things, and that comes from his military experience, and his own struggles with dealing with the after effects of not taking responsibility for your own actions, and not holding yourself to a higher standard. Whenever I do tell my story about what happened with my father, and why I do not see him anymore, many people believe that I should hate him, mistreat him, and that there is nothing to learn from him, and that I shouldn't hope to be like him. But the part of him that I do aspire to, is the parts that he received all those years back when he was deployed, and that is the part that I carry along with me to this day as the only one of my family with his last name of 'Ackerman', that same accountability that he learned was important, and I learned through his own mistakes of its importance.

My loss of a parent is not a normal loss. I lost my biological father at the age of four, not because of his death, but because of his inability to control himself, leading to him cheating on my then-pregnant mother, who had my little sister inside of her at seven months pregnant. My loss of him, was not traditional, and I have heard many times that, 'at least I still have him in my life'. A loss of someone from your life, is as good as the loss of their life as well. I was forced to grow up without a father figure in my life all the same, and had nobody to turn to when it came to dealing with all of the things that young men grow up with when they start to come of age into this world that we live in today. I was too young to see then, but when I got older, I started to realize the impact on my life that not having my father there for me caused on me. Namely, when I first started to reach the age of twelve years old, and puberty struck, I had no idea what was happening, and why I felt certain ways, whether it be anger, pain, or anything else that came with becoming a man instead of a boy. Bless my mother, as she had to deal with a young child that never learned how to deal with his own anger at a father that he never knew, and the result of that was self hatred. Self hatred is a incredibly difficult emotion to describe unless you have gone through it yourself, and because of my complete lack of emotional intelligence, I couldn't help but just know that I felt 'bad'. I had no clue what feeling 'bad' meant or what that would mean for me in the long run, but as a growing kid, what I never expected was the lack of someone to talk too about how to deal with emotions would lead me into a seven year long run of depression and suicidal tendencies, causing me to commit harm against myself in many ways, all eventually leading to the stem that was not actually knowing what was going on with myself. I think despite all of that though, losing my father defines me no longer, and the reason for that isn't because I was able to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and it wasn't because I worked hard. In fact, I worked less than anyone that I've known when it came to dealing with my own depression, as my healing came from God and God alone, with nothing else able to satiate my need for love from a father that I never knew. The infinite love of the Lord Jesus Christ however, the Living Water and the Bread of Life, satiated me to the point of leaving that past life of mental struggle behind. Do I hate my father for leaving my family behind? No, rather, I can thank him for making me who I am today, and giving me the opportunity to relate to other's with that testimony.

When I was growing up, I never felt the lack of a biological father until much later in life, when I realized just how much different my life was from the rest of the people surrounding me when I started to go to therapy for depression at nineteen, opening up everything about my past for the first time. I felt like my situation, losing my father at four years old and living with just my mother and my baby sister who is now sixteen, didn't affect me growing up, since I had my uncle-who visited me and my mother's family at least once a week so my mother could go to her job. As well as my uncle, I have my now stepfather, who I have known for a little under half of my life, and has taught me everything I never learnt about what it means to be a man. When I was growing up with just my mother and my baby sister, we were very poor as the sudden lack of a income affected our family badly. However, I never felt that as a kid, and I am forever grateful to my mother for that; she was able to make sure we were well fed, entertained, and clothed under a roof despite being left seven months pregnant and helpless. My mother fought tirelessly in order to help me grow up to be the man I am today, and there isn't anything I could give her that I feel would make up for that. Despite everything that happened in my life, all of the times I've wronged her, she has stuck with me since birth, which is something I was slightly jealous of when compared to my biological father, and seeing other kid's fathers caring for them. My mother was able to direct my attention elsewhere despite my feelings, and I attribute her constantly keeping up with me, ADHD and all, to me being able to safely say I have no trouble from my past. My attention was focused entirely on my mother, and she took all of it in stride despite her stories about how overwhelming an overly-energetic little boy who never slept was, and yet I never felt that either. That all changed however, when I met my stepdad when I was nine. Suddenly, I had two more sisters, one older one younger, and an older brother as well, an experience I wasn't familiar with as I was the oldest on my side of the family. I was very shy at first when talking to my stepdad, but after few shared words over nine years, yet endless hours spent together, he is someone that I can rely when I need help doing anything at all, just as much as my mother was when I was younger. Because of him, I learned how to shave, how to fix cars, how to weightlift, the joys of wrestling, and most importantly, spending time in the world God created and living off of the land. My current job as a senior technician, my love for cars and what I consider my biggest accomplishments difficulty wise, would never have happened without him, and his guidance. And for my mother, her stability despite my rough upbringing that should have traumatized me and yet didn't caused me to be the reliable man that I can be proud of today, despite what the actions of someone else might have caused. Because of who I call my mother and stepfather, I live my life helping as many people as I can, and being reliable to everyone.

God has been with me my whole life, but I have not been with him. For seven years, from ages twelve through nineteen, I lived my life completely apart from God, acting how I wanted too, living in sin, refusing to repent, and doing whatever it is that my flesh desired instead of following my Lord and savior. When I was a kid, I loved God and loved reading the children's Bible, and even read from Genesis through Numbers at nine. I was dedicated, and I loved the Lord. But then I got introduced to the world of lust at twelve years old through pornography, and since that day, I remember it being a Wednesday, I lived my life apart from the Lord. I did practically everything a person could think of doing, I drank alcohol, partied, lived a life of lust, had lustful relationships, smoked, fought, ran from cops, street raced, anything and everything that could be done, I sought after it, hoping to fill the gap that the lack of having my Lord on the throne of my heart had made. And the fact is, nothing but God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is able to fully satisfy a person, and I lived as a perfect example of that. I dealt with heavy depression, and prayed to a God that I didn't obey or believe in the first place, that if he was real, to just take away my own life. I slept four hours a day, as most my knights were spent furiously hating myself in between spurts of lustful desire, of which I gave into and then wondered why I felt so bad. I think I got the worst when I reached eighteen, and decided that after my graduation party on June 30th, I was going to take my own life by driving into a tree in my rusty old 2007 Hyundai Elantra. However, just a week before then, I met someone online. A girl, who led me out of my depression. I became reliant on her, and we started dating. She lived in Pennsylvania, and she became my sole focus, yet even still I lived entirely lustfully with her, and even drove sixteen hours straight in the same Elantra that I had planned to take my own life in to her house, and gave into temptation. Just six months later, we broke up, and again I found myself in the same mental state, hating myself, and wishing that I had never been born. I remember picking up a gun that my grandfather had given me in order to teach my two little sisters how to shoot with, and holding it to my head after that situation. And yet, I felt a calling in my Spirit, one that told me to pick up that old Bible I read when I was nine, four houses ago, and read it for the first time. I found it after days of looking despite my crippling depression and inability to eat, and opened it up to Proverbs 3:12, "My son, do not despise the LORD's discipline, and do not resent his rebuke, because the LORD disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in." Since that moment, for the past year and a quarter, I have devoted myself to living for the Lord in every facet of my life, whether it be as an honest automotive mechanic, student, son, brother, or friend. And I know from experience, that when times get tough and stress increases, God is always there for me to rest upon.

I've loved designing different things for as long as I can remember, starting with Legos as a kid, marble works, and ignoring anything else. I graduated to Snap Circuits, building my electrical engineering college, and then moving to 'experiments' that I did with my uncle, mixing whatever random chemicals we could find and put together, and making a giant mess every time. I lived outside, and observed everything about it, loving every minute that I could spend looking out at the sky and the animals and plants around me, wondering what it was that made them work. I distinctively remember as a kid, in about the 1st or 2nd grade, checking out a professional etymology book about insects and arachnids that was made for young adults. I didn't understand half of what was inside that book, but it built my ability to read complicated things such as that. It followed me through my life into the 4th and 5th grade, where I read every single book about the design and function of all of the US military vehicles in the entirety of both our in-person and online school libraries. Then, in 6th-8th grade, I fell in love with the aspect of theoretical engineering, through a program at my STEM middle school Saratoga, called Future Cities. I went to the State level competition for my 2nd and 3rd years of doing that competition, and I dived into researching about future technologies such as Hard Light, Fusion Energy, Antigravity using principles of Anti-matter, among other things as well. Our team consisted of two researchers, a SIM city player, and an essay writer. My essay writers disliked me majorly, because I would pump out insane ideas that probably weren't possible, but I tried my best to make them work besides that. Engineering has been my passion forever, and when I started to work on cars and learn to be a man thanks to my stepfather in place of my biological father, my love for it deepened. Even now, I make massive lists of engine swaps and transmission swaps on many different vehicles, but it started nearly 10 years ago when me and my stepfather replaced the engine out of his 2006 Honda Civic. Thanks to my love for all things automotive, when I got my first chance at being a technician, I went to Kia, and after one and a half years of dealing with Kia's lack of reliability in all facets of design, I decided that I wanted to not just be someone who puts terribly built vehicles on the road again and again, but that I wanted to put good, reliable vehicles on the road, and have them stay there instead of needing to be fixed over and over again, fixing the same issue many different times because companies refuse to be as reliable as they once were.

As a senior level technician in the automotive world, I see lots of things when it comes to how cars are designed nowadays. I see all of the constant problems at the company that I work for, and communicating with my fellow automotive technicians, I also see all of the problems that they see from a day to day basis as well. Some examples I can include from my own job as a Kia certified technician, is the unreliable nature of the engines and transmissions that are due to poorly designed piston rings, and a poorly designed operating system for the Transmission due to basic design principles that have seemed to been lost over the course of times. Nowadays, cars have ten speed transmissions, but last a quarter as long as their old counterparts, simply because the design language of the transmission means applying and un-applying the clutch discs many different times over. There are many other things, such as the insulation for all of the wiring in every single modern car ever made, including soy products. I've had to stop a fire in my mother's own car, because mice are so attracted to the wiring insulation that they are attracted to and chew through all the wires. And that is something that I want to change. I do recognize that, as one person, it will be very hard for me to be able to alter what it is exactly with the current designers of cars that makes them want to design the modern day vehicles in such flawed ways, but I want to change that all the same. I want to build the modern vehicles of tomorrow from the ground up, so that they are affordable, easy to work on, but most importantly, reliable. Reliability is something that is lacking everywhere in modern day cars, and I want to work to change that, one step at a time, no matter how long it might take me. Maybe I can start the future where cars no longer drop half of their value just driving off the lot. Maybe I can change the belief that you 'shouldn't buy a car older than a 2016' that I hear so often, and sadly I have to endorse as well. Because when I was a kid, and I was growing up learning about vehicles, engines, transmissions, electrical, planes, and trains, I never thought the supposed vehicles of tomorrow that I dreamt about day in and day out would be so lackluster in every facet of their being. As for the second question, gratefully, all of my immediate siblings are alive, and technically, so are my parents. However, when I was four, my birth father cheated on my pregnant mother, and they divorced because of it. I grew up without knowing my father very well, or even at all, with my only few memories of him being when he decided to be a father for a couple of days every couple of years. Growing up, I never even learned about anything related to being a 'man' so to speak, until I finally met my stepfather, who introduced into the world of vehicles and design in the first place. However, the one thing I do take from my father, is to be honest to who I am as a person, and to be honest to the people around me. Because I refuse to ever betray someone the way that he betrayed my mother.