Choose Love, Be Determined

Thinking about and choosing only two values was extremely difficult as I base my choices on a whole system of values, but in the end, for me, it really boiled down to love and determination. Love is a word that is all inclusive to me. If you love people and live your life with love,  you will be kind, grateful, and patient. These are just a few values that can be encompassed by the word love. Determination is important to me because of the relationship that I had with my Papaw.  He is the person who showed me what determination is and how important it is for success. I believe that having ability alone is not enough to succeed. Determination is where success comes from because to get anywhere, you have to want it.

Considering my top values, I believe that the best personal mission statement to describe how I want to live is Choose Love, Be Determined. Though it is not creative whatsoever, it perfectly sums up my values. I hope to have a career in medicine and do research. Getting there and being successful will depend on my determination and my love for people as the purpose of medicine is to care for others.

Dogs and hammers and scrubs, oh my

This semester I have completed around thirty-five community service. I have worked with the Humane Society of Washington County, Habitat for Humanity, and Johnson City Medical Center.

Habitat for Humanity was not at all what I was expecting. I went with Haley Owens and Ashley Sexton to the build site. In the email that we received, we were told that we would be working on framing. I was not worried about it because I had helped my dad frame the roof of a building, but when we got there, we were put in charge of the waterproof membrane. It is plastic backed with tar that has to be stuck to houses to help keep water out. With that, it turned into a situation that made me think of the show, Dirty Jobs. The membrane stuck to itself, to the ground, to us, to anything that it touched. This meant that we had to get sticky to put it where it was supposed to go. To do it we had to be in the ditch around the house ,so, as we got sticky, the dirt stuck to us. It was comical yet miserable because peeling it off from our skin was actually kind of painful. At the end of the day, it was actually pretty awesome to think that we had helped to build someone’s house, even if our part seemed small. 

I first began volunteering with the humane society because I missed my pets at home. My roommate and I volunteer volunteer for the humane society together, and decided to be involved with the decorations committee for Barktoberfest. Barktoberfest is a fall festival that the humane society holds to raise money. As a part of the decorations committee, my roommate and I helped choose, make, and put up decorations. One thing that we were responsible for were the donation buckets. We chose to use the plastic jack-o’-lanterns that children often use for trick-or- treating. It ended up being an adventure as we tried to carry all twenty buckets around at once.  On the day of the event, we helped decorate Founders Park, and we stayed to help with the event. We were in charge of the kissing booth. At the kissing booth, I got to hang out with the cutest puppy. She was a bully mix who was up for adoption. She did the kissing while I kept track of donations. 

Overall, I have twenty community service hours through the humane society and look forward to working with them on more projects.

Recently, I started volunteering at Johnson City Medical Center. I am in the PEDs emergency department and look forward to seeing what it holds. I have only volunteered for six hours at this point, so I have a lot more to learn and experience there.

 

Letting Go

My idol when I was in elementary school was Taylor Swift. I bought every single CD. I actually remember listening to her first album using a portable CD player. When her second album, Fearless, came out, it came with a poster. The poster is 8×10, has creases because of the way it was folded in the CD case, and has a picture of Taylor Swift from her “Love Story” music video. Once I got it home, I took out the CD and stuck it in the CD player, and while I listened to the CD, I took out the poster and put it on my wall. It hung beside my window in the same place where I put it that day until a couple of weeks before I moved to college, but I not bring it with me. Instead, I took it down.

Fearless was released in November of 2008, making me nine at the time. At that point in my life I spent all of my time trying to be like the girls who I believed to be my best friends. I have never been skinny, they were. I have never been charming, they were. I have never been funny, they were. These were the things that fourth grade me was worried about constantly. I come from a tiny town in east Tennessee, so there weren’t that many people to relate to and become friends with in elementary school. I knew that I wasn’t really like those girls– not athletic, not funny, not pretty– but they were my friends. Were they ever really my best friends? NO. Still, they were there.

The paragraph above represents the thought process that I lived by even after I found my real best friends in middle school and drifted apart from my early childhood friends.  Because of my experiences in elementary school, I never really felt accepted and held myself back. I knew I was smart, but that was the only credit that I ever gave myself. Even then, I would not speak in class for fear of sounding stupid. I was in constant fear of what other people would think about me.

The struggle continued as I entered high school, spending every day thinking about how ugly I was and how disappointed I was that I didn’t change in the way I hoped to before freshman year. Each year I told myself that the next would be better, but it never was. I always hoped for some miracle, but it never happened. Eventually, during my senior year, I began to give up. I was so unhappy that for months I refused to talk to anyone about everything that was going on in my head. When summer started and I was finally away from the pressure that came with my massive high school, I finally started getting better. I spent the summer volunteering and working, away from my own thoughts. It was the best I had felt in years.

A few weeks before I moved, I got my wisdom teeth removed. Most people feel groggy and tired while on the pain pills, but I felt amazing, so amazing that I finally began to clean out my room. When I was finishing up, I began to look at the poster. In that moment, I realized that I wanted something better than what I had ever let myself have. I wanted freedom from the past, to keep moving towards the future. I wanted to be able to leave that part of me behind, but I didn’t want that part of me to return when I go home. My solution was to take it down. As I did, I felt liberated, but I also felt like crying as I realized that my taking down that poster was the end of my childhood. Yes, I had been eighteen for two months at that point, but I didn’t feel like an adult until that moment.

I took the poster down carefully. I still could not bear to rip it. I decided that, with all the weight it held, I still wanted to keep it. I tried to take the tape off to fold it up, but the tape wouldn’t come off without ripping the poster. I decided to rip up copy paper to cover the tape. Then I folded the poster using the creases that were still there from it being folded up inside the CD case. I put it inside a drawer under a stack of things in my room, and I haven’t looked at it since.

Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race Exhibition

I have been to the United States National Holocaust Memorial Museum twice. Both times I left feeling upset, even a little sick, thinking about what humans can do to each other. I left the Reece Museum with the same feeling in September after visiting Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race Exhibition, which showed the progression of the holocaust and science. We often see science as the one thing that has the ability to protect us, to save us. To read about the involvement of science was interesting as the holocaust is typically only discussed in a historical context, yet it was somehow even worse to think about its connection to science.  I want to go into medicine someday and hope to be involved in research, so thinking about the fact that the doctors who were involved in the holocaust were happy to be a part of it blows my mind. I hope that I will always choose to be a positive force and always make the best decisions for others where their health is concerned.