Maintaining a healthy lifestyle should be important to everyone. It is honestly really hard to maintain a healthy lifestyle when you are poor, but I really try my best. I have a five year old daughter and an eighteen month old son who watch my every move. I try my best to set as good of an example of a healthy lifestyle for my children as possible. It is really important to me that I make sure my children are eating a very well balanced diet and getting regular exercise. It is really important that my family has a healthy lifestyle, because I want to spend as much time with them as possible.

Depression kills. Dogs save lives by fighting depression. They don’t even know that they’re fighting, or at least mine doesn’t. She has no idea that while she’s flopping around my yard being a normal dog, she’s fighting a demon stronger than I have ever been. She thinks she is just having fun when she jumps at the punching bag or hops on my lap to give me a hug, but really she’s saving my life every single time. She loves me, even more on my bad days, and never fails to show me that. I am so proud to have her as a member of my family and a front-runner on my depression fighting team! I couldn’t be luckier!

My greatest achievement to date is waking up this morning. You see, I have a silent killer named depression that lives inside me. It claims the lives of one hundred and thirty individuals each and every day, and it has been trying its best to make me one of them for as long as I can remember. Depression is feeling numb but feeling everything at once. It's sleeping way too much or not at all. It's pushing your friends away because you're tired of feeling like a burden. It's never doing anything because you're too scared of failing. It's feeling like you'll never be good enough no matter how hard you try, and nothing is ever going to get better for you. Depression is looking in the mirror and not even recognizing the person looking back at you. When you run out of strength to fight, that when depression kills you and everybody calls it a suicide. I admit, I've been in that place several times. I've wanted to give up and just die. I've wanted to let depression win. I almost did. I did not though. I kept arguing with my depression. I fought against it in order to get myself help. Through lots of trial and error to find the right medication and many years of therapy, I've managed to get myself to a point where I am happy with my life. That is why waking up each morning is my new greatest achievement. My experience with coming out of depression has taught me a lot about myself. It taught me that every day is a reset, and that in itself is a blessing. It taught me that I am worth the fight against depression. I deserve to be on this earth, and I am going to make a difference. The most important thing that my experience taught me about myself though, is the fact that I will always be strong enough to handle whatever comes my way. In the future, I hope to be a teacher whose classroom is a safe place for all. I want to educate children and foster a love of learning. I want to be there for children to be able to see things in them that their parents might not be able to. If I had had a teacher speak up for me, things could have gotten better a lot sooner for me. I want to be that teacher for someone.

At seventeen years old, I found myself pregnant with my daughter. Her father was only fifteen and nowhere near ready for his job as a father. He got sent to a group home for delinquent children shortly a year after she was born and has been in and out of her life since then. I was then not only a teenage mother, but a single mother too. Everyone told me I would drop out of high school and that I would never be a good example for my child. My daughter spent the first year of her life in and out of hospitals due to being born prematurely. She was also diagnosed with Developmental Hip Dysplasia. She spent thirteen weeks in a spica cast and a year in a rhino brace. To this day, every six months, I have to travel with her to Shriners Hospital for Children in Lexington, Kentucky. It caused me to drop out of school to take care of her. It was a horrible feeling to have everyone saying that they were right about me. I felt too guilty to leave her to go to school. I was scared that something would happen with her health while I was gone. Reliable childcare is also a hard thing to find in Summers County, West Virginia. I never thought I'd get to go to college. After her health stabilized, I set out to not only prove everyone wrong about me, but I also had things to prove to myself. I enrolled in an online program, and I earned my high school diploma and graduated with a 3.5 GPA. Now, at twenty-four, I am the mother of two young children who look up to my every move. I plan to use my higher education to show both of my children that even the hard things are attainable if you put your mind to it and work hard. I want to show them that there are still ways in this world to be able to make a difference.