Haider Mahmood
Dr. Carrie Hall
English 1121
February 7, 2019
Personal Breakthrough
I am in my high school auditorium having a good time with my friends. Its 1:30 because I usually skip this US government because if I go I end up falling asleep anyway. If you deeply inhale you can smell the pizza the school has been serving every Friday for the last 50 years. I feel comfortable and happy that I’m hanging with my friend but at the same time I feel guilty for not going to class. I look around and see multiple people crossing through the auditorium wearing the gym outfit trying to get to the C-Gym. Then there’s those multiple group of friends just like us who didn’t feel like going to class.
Why is class so important to me? Why would I feel guilty if I’ve been skipping classes for the last 3 years of my high school? Because this year its graduation. If I pass my classes I get to go to graduation and if I fail I would have to do another semester in high school. Even though I never was interested in going to graduation I still knew inside me that it was a once in a lifetime moment. So why was I not going to class. For two reasons one because I had a bad group of friends around me and the second being my accent.
The reason I hung out with these people is because even though they were a bad influence they were just like me. We all would be going through the something like a problem in life and we could count of each. We all would skip a classis and at the same time and meet and in the auditorium and talk about it. The best part is we didn’t judge each other, and we always helped each other find solutions. The reason we would have skip class is because all of us got out of school at different times and none of us had lunch senior year.
Growing up with my mom teaching me Urdu and only speaking to me in Urdu confused me in a lot in middle school a lot. When I went to school and where we spoke English transitioning from my Urdu to English I developed an accent. Even though I could perfectly understand people in English, when I tried to reply they couldn’t understand me. This limited my ability to speak a lot with my friends, I couldn’t communicate as much and couldn’t participate in activities. The reason I’m telling you this is because in high school I didn’t have a heavy accent, but the point was that even when you don’t have the accent no more it’s the fact that having it makes you uncomfortable at times.
What was the point of coming to school? What’s the best way to make money if I leave? What can I do to change my habits? What can I do to boost my confidence? Questions I would ask myself every day. It wasn’t until I realized that life was all about evolving, becoming a better version of yourself. At the second I decided it was time for me to change everything. I met up with all my friends and everything I wanted to do just left my mind. It went back to just having fun in life. As much as I wanted to do good in school I also wanted to have fun. I have this mentality if something isn’t fun I really don’t want to do it. I realized before I tell my friends I must change my mindset. It took a week to see that I really wouldn’t be something in life if I didn’t graduate. I went to my friends and told them we should start going to class.
I finally had enough courage to say those magic words. They looked at me and asked what happened. I told them everything I started thinking of for example we would have no careers and be making no real money in life. I started to convince them all to class too. Now that I started going to all my classes my only problem left was my accent. I asked everyone I knew what I could do about that and they said just practice. So, every day I would go to an English tutor that would teach me a bunch of new words and then I would go home finish homework asap to practice my words and that really helped because by the end of high school my accent started fading away. As classes end I got my report card and going to class really paid off because I didn’t fail any. Summer came, and I did the same thing every day I would practice my words.
In conclusion working hard in life really pays off. changing your mentality can really get you somewhere in life. If you want to accomplish something, then you must put everything you got into it. its good if you change your bad habits but even better if you change your friends too. To succeed together is the best feeling knowing all of you made.
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