My mom and dad were separated from the age of one, due to her finding out he committed a horrible crime she never knew about. While sometimes I went to his house on weekends, it was rare and he was in and out of jail. My mom wasn't helped by her poor connection to some of the rest of her family, including her dad, who I didn't know until I was four years old. I won't discuss the events of my mom's life that have led to it, because it isn't really my story to tell, but all things considered, she's never had the best mental health. She may not realize it, but I have watched her suffer from horrible anxiety and a lot of OCD-like tendencies, along with the seasonal depression. The ways she deals with these issues, I imagine due to the denial of them, is through smoking and alcohol. She's a great mom despite these things but I have seen her struggle and wished I could help her more as her child. She doesn't struggle as much now but between the ages of 18-45 I think she did a lot. I think watching my mom struggle with her mental health and the poor ways she copes with it have played a big role in my interest in pursuing social work. I want to help people, and ideally as I want to work with kids, I'd like to help them before they hit the poor circumstances my mom was in by the time she was an adult living with my father. I don't want people to spend thirty years of their lives struggling like I've seen not just my mom, but many other family members I've had struggle through. I think if I was raised with my mom not being a single parent my entire childhood, I would be a very different person. Maybe I would still want to help people, but it would probably be in a different way. Any future where I get to help struggling children before they hit adulthood is a future I want. I don't know precisely what I want to do yet, but I know I want to help kids, so they don't struggle like my mom did with my deadbeat of a father as she did the years leading up to when I was born and continued to struggle afterwards. I just want to know I helped in a way that really affects them, and that someone was impacted by my actions and choices in a positive way. Aside from that, whatever else happens in my future will be perfectly fine by me.

I was raised by a single mom with a very low income who had never been married in her life. My dad also had little money and I only saw him every other weekend, as he was not very present nor was he a good dad. I love both of my parents even if they are not always the best, especially my dad, but he is not the focus of the essay as he has not been present enough for me to write about. My mom has never had a very good support system and being a single parent raising a little kid on a very low budget did not help her mental health situation. Maybe being in a single-parent household hasn't been the specific thing to affect me, but growing up poor with a mother who has little to fall back on in cases of emotional issues has definitely impacted me in a way that I wouldn't have been if my mom had been able to be with a mature person who could help support us. I have seen the ups and downs of her mental health and wish she had had a better support system and more resources to get help when she was struggling on her own both emotionally and financially. I think seeing my mom's mental health during my life has been one of the things to push me into wanting to go into the mental health field. I want to go into social work, possibly at schools, to help children who might not be in the best circumstances. I also would like to do more charity work or donate when I am older and have more resources and money. I want to help as many people as I can, because these days we all need as much assistance and help as we can get with the economy and community we have. People need to be able to foster a community of caring friends and neighbors who we know we can lean on, and I hope to somehow help that idea become a reality again in a world where we are so disconnected. I have no doubt that growing up seeing my mom struggle has really impacted my path in life a lot and I have no doubt that if my mom had more people in her community to fall back to that we would have been much better off.

I have had a lot of mental health struggles since 2021 and I would like to think I have done a decent job overcoming at least some of them, mainly my anxiety and my eating disorder. My anxiety can get very bad, from shaking while talking to new people or even just sudden shortness of breath and a racing heart from the sudden anxiety. It got much worse after 2020, due to the pandemic and my mental health generally being poor in 2021. Since my junior year though, I have been making the attempt to join more clubs and meet and talk to more people. I like to think it has become a bit easier as of recent, and it has. The anxiety is still very much there and I can still feel myself get lightheaded from it, but I am working on it and getting better on it. On the other hand there is my eating disorder. I had an eating disorder for about two years and it tended to get pretty bad some days. I do not want to go into too many details over this one, because it is more private than simply talking about my anxiety, but I counted calories a lot and weighed myself a lot. But with the help of my boyfriend I like to think I have almost completely overcome it. I eat normally now and do not over think it most days and I don't excessively walk or run after eating anymore. I still definitely have rough days but I am doing much better than I was for a couple years. I like to think I am very supportive of my friends mental health struggles just as they have been for my own. Moving forward, I was recently accepted into the Life Savers program, and I would hope that that can help me to help others through the program. We plan to try and raise more awareness of the program than we have in the last year or two (largely due to funding issues) to help my peers know they always have a student they can talk to. After high school though, I plan to do something related to social work, likely in a school setting. I would like to try my best to help the youth with their mental health problems because the sooner we can stop the problems the easier they may be to prevent in the future. I am excited for any opportunities to improve my understanding of mental health and the ways I can help others like so many have for me.

My favorite aspect of Minecraft is the building. I absolutely love building in Minecraft as it lets me utilize my creativity in such a way I would never dream of in most circumstances. I’ve been playing Minecraft since I was around seven and as long as I can remember I have always loved building over anything else. I can still remember my first ever build on my old tablet in fact. It was a brown stained clay(now known as terracotta in-game) castle in a flat world. I don’t believe I added much else to the castle before starting the rest of my town in that world though. Of course, I was seven or eight so it really wasn’t a great build, but it was so special I can remember it even ten years later. I do know that once I lost that original tablet and got a new one, I immediately started another town with a castle. This one was emerald and was definitely a little bigger. I remember that town a lot better, I spent hours of every day just building on it with my cousins. Nowadays, a lot of times I tend to sketch out my build on paper a bit before I actually get started which allows me to see the build in more than one dimension. Even the Minecraft content I watch is largely about building. I watch Hermitcraft, a large server known for their out-of-this-world builders. There are times I really have teared up seeing the beautiful builds others can create, and I strive to build as well as they do one day. I truly believe building in Minecraft has helped shape my artistic abilities over all these years. Minecraft and the building you do while playing really hold a special place in my heart.

Taylor Swift’s music has helped me through a lot of hard times and has especially helped me this year in particular. I’ll go over multiple songs in this essay, including “Shake If Off,” and “Wildest Dreams.” If I had to choose a song from Taylor Swift’s hit album, 1989, to describe my year, it would be “Shake It Off” first and foremost. The song itself is about trying to stay unbothered about the setbacks in your life and doing your best to rise above them. I feel that I have definitely been faced with that challenge this year, be it with hard classes, mental health issues, among others. This song in particular out of Taylor songs has helped me remember that it will only be a small moment in my life and that I’ll be able to get past it. It has helped me get past letting others' opinions negatively affect me. This song really is inspirational and calming, and even despite the fact I can not relate to every lyric in the way they were written, I can relate to them on a deeper level that allows me to understand Taylor’s struggle as well as my own. Even with that though, I do relate to certain lyrics such as, “I stay out too late, got nothin’ in my brain.” Obviously that is a stereotype that many smart and confident women deal with, and it simply is not true. “Shake It Off” allows me to remember that these stereotypes don’t matter and that I should just let them roll off my shoulders. Another song that I say could help describe my year is “Wildest Dreams.” While this song is about a dwindling relationship, I think it can apply to many other things in one’s life. Especially in the first verse, the lyrics, “Let's get out of this town, drive out of the city, away from the crowds. I thought Heaven can't help me now. Nothing lasts forever, but this is gonna take me down,” feel very reminiscent of my life this year and the decisions regarding what I plan to do with my life and the stress that comes with it. While Taylor worries about her boyfriend not remembering her after their breakup, I worry about how my friends may forget me once I move out for college or university. Overall I think these two songs in particular summarize my year so far very well. They can easily sum up my stresses and worries and tell me how I should move past them. I love Taylor Swift and these songs are a perfect example as to why.