From the first breath I took, I have experienced violence. I was born on March 22, 2003, and the U.S. invasion of Iraq started on March 20th. There had been a bombing or explosion of some sort in the hospital that I was born in. I don’t remember this, but I have carried a long-term effect of it to this day. I lost some hearing in my right ear. I can hear with my right ear, but I do realize the difference. My right ear feels blocked compared to my left ear. This challenge resulted in me having to sit in front of every class in middle school. I didn’t mind this because I knew it was for the better, it made it easier for me to learn. Another way that I overcame this challenge was by being provided a hearing aid. In 2007, there was a suicide bomb that had detonated by our elementary school. The terrorist group targeted a Christian school, and it led to many deaths and injuries. I wasn’t old enough to go to school at that age, since I was only four years old. However, I remember it, vividly. I remember the fear in my parents' eyes and the rush to school. We went there in hopes of finding my brother, who was only a year older than me. I remember seeing the sight of debris from the classrooms. I remember hearing yelling for their children and children screaming in pain. Even though my family and I left Iraq in 2011, four years after the bombing, this was still one of the driving forces on why my parents decided to leave Iraq. That decision changed my life because of where I am today. This challenge made me who I am today because it showed me how to be grateful. These types of things happen every day to countless people, and I am grateful I made it out. Having come from a foreign country, making it harder for me to do well in school. In the 5th grade, when students were reading “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” I was learning grammar and punctuation. While students had elective classes like art and music in middle school, I had ELD. A program for English learners that we had to test out of. While my friends were taking college prep classes, I challenged myself and took Honors and AP classes. In the end, I still read “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” I still made it out of ELD and joined ASB, and became the Treasurer. I have had to work harder than a lot of my peers to get on the same level as them. I remember back in second grade, in Iraq, we were learning a new language. We were learning Assyrian Aramaic, a different dialect of Aramaic than the one I speak. This language was difficult for me to learn due to being raised to learn a different language and going to school to learn another language. I was struggling, the teacher made me get up and read in front of the class. I failed, and he slapped me across the face. It wasn’t a little slap on the hand, like when you do to a kid to stop them from touching something they are not supposed to be touching like something hot or electricity. This slap was loud. It made the kids in my class quiet. I remember sitting back down and my cheek stinging. That type of learning is different from the learning I have had in this country. I am grateful for this country because of how many opportunities it has given me, opportunities that I did not have back home. I have received a great education so far, and I want to further my education through college. I want to be the first person in my family with a degree.

Whether you are generally an energetic person with uplifting and positive energy, or not, you will still have bad days. Having specific times of your life where you are not your best self is just human nature, we all feel like that at times. We all have those bad days. It might be due to many things that we have bad days, it might be something that annoyed you at work or school, or continuous things that happen throughout the day. Whatever the reasons are, we have those days regardless. At times, and for many, these bad days go for longer than just a day, it could be a time period of your life. I call these days 'stormy days.' Like every storm, they are temporary. Some storms are longer than others, but what they all have in common is that they pass, regardless. There are many quotes that resonate with what I have said. "It is just a bad day, not a bad life," "You have to fight through some bad days to earn the best days of your life," "May the flowers remind us why the rain was necessary," "The way I see it, you want the rainbow, you got to put up with the rain." All of these quotes use different words to say the same thing. It is not about the quote, but the mindset that comes with living with these quotes. One has to realize that without these bad days, we wouldn't have any good days. If every day was a good day, then no day would be good. We would just have days. A day cannot be a good day if you cannot compare it to a bad day. We need bad days so that we can enjoy and appreciate the good days when they come. I have lived by this for a couple of years now, I used to always be down and have a negative outlook on things. I would not be appreciative and grateful for what I had, I just focused on what else I wanted. If I was sad about something, I would only focus on that sadness, I let the bad days get to me. I had no realized that those days were necessary for me to have good days. Now, I have a much more positive view of my life. I wake up every day with the idea of having that day be a good day, and if something bad ends up happening, then that is just something that happened, and I choose how I react to it. I do not dwell on the past, I try to always be in the moment and live in the present so that I can truly live and enjoy every second of the present.