Aaron Gamble
10/11/15
English 1101
Personal Narrative Essay draft #2

The Move

Have you ever woken up and found your life changing before your eyes? Moving from New York to Georgia was probably one of my biggest struggles to this day. It all happened so suddenly and for a long time I had a lot of anger built up towards my mother for deciding to pick us up and drop us off in a totally different environment and culture. As time passed and I got older, I slowly began to understand more and more. Maybe moving down there was the best thing for us at that time, maybe it was the best thing for me. Throughout this essay, I will take you on a trip down memory lane, and hopefully show you a slight view of my life and the struggles that came with it early on. Struggles including, the questions I had formed over the move, life before the move, the different hotels that housed us then eventually our permanent home.
This small town in Georgia was going to be my new home and the only things I knew about the place was its name, how hot it was, and the fact that most of my family lived there. It wasn’t something I was used to at all. When I was younger my grandmother and I used to take trips down there, and I like it, but it just wasn’t home. We all know the feeling of home, and I didn’t have an ounce of that feeling in my body. To this day, I appreciate and claim that I was raised in my small town, Augusta Georgia. It made me the person I am today.
I moved down to Augusta at the age of nine. Life as I knew it was pretty simple as far as I could tell. I took karate lessons, learned how to swim, and played many sports. It was the good life for me, but it wasn’t for my mother. She did her best to hide and protect me from certain things. I guess she figured that I was too young to know everything. We moved because the price of living in New York was too demanding and moving down south was cheaper and eventually will be better for us.
Well that wasn’t something I knew when we moved. From my perspective, everything was different. We went from having our own apartment in which I had my own room to my mother and I basically sleeping in one of our cousin’s living room. I slept on the floor, which wasn’t the best. I hated it. I hated everything. As a couple of weeks passed by, my mother and cousin got into a disagreement, and she basically kicked us out.
As a couple of weeks passed by, my mom found a job working at this hotel bar. We moved in with another one of our cousins and finally everything seemed on the up and up. The apartment we all lived in wasn’t that much, as a matter of fact it was only a two bedroom and it was a total seven of us. We struggled, my cousin didn’t have a job and didn’t have a steady source of income and my mother was working extremely hard, trying to save enough for our own apartment plus give my cousin money from time to time. As bad as that might sound and as bad as I wanted to complain, I just couldn’t. I learned a lot during that time and got much closer to my family. I learned that it wasn’t just me struggling and having a bad time, it was all of us, including my family and most of the families in the project.
My experience wasn’t always the best, but it’s my experience. I can say that I did these things and that I know about some stuff other people might not know about. Some people didn’t grow up in the ghetto. Some people will never know the effort of striving for something better for you and your family and struggling until you finally get what you want. Hopefully you get a peek into my world as I intended you to. I hope you gain some insight of what it’s like and understand a little better of those difficult challenges.