I was born to a drug addicted, high school drop-out mother and a similarly addicted, unemployed father. My first home was the cold basement of my grandparents because my mother and father had no money to their names to raise me. Despite that, they had another child a year after I was born, only worsening our financial status. A few years later my father did find work and I did get to know a home outside of a basement. Although it was for a brief time, our first house was home to some of the happiest memories of my life. 

            We moved around constantly and eventually these houses stopped feeling like homes. There were times where my brother and I missed school for weeks on end, primarily because my mother had either disappeared with the car or sold it to someone for drug money. Although my father was employed, my unemployed mother often stole the rent and food money for her own personal habits, so we were routinely evicted from our houses for not being able to pay our rent. I could never manage to make any friends, so my brother and I were extremely close because in the face of all the chaos we would come to know, we had each other. Sometimes that was enough-- even when our parents weren’t there. 

            After about four years, when I was about eight years old, we moved back into the same basement in which we had suffered in previously, but then my mother and father were rapidly growing apart. Despite that, however, they had another daughter in another futile attempt to save a dying relationship. After she was born, my mother acquired the habit of not only doing drugs but disappearing for great lengths of time. Some of my most profound childhood memories are me waiting by the phone or the window just waiting for her to call or come home. I’d often fall asleep with the phone in my hands and wake up hating myself because I could have missed her call. The adults in my family always told us that she was visiting family or in the hospital. The truth was she was either in jail or in some kind of rehabilitation center that always seemed to fail. At night I would often lie awake, desperately trying to hang on to that memory of a happy family that was continually slipping away from my mind. It was like a fading picture that had fallen off the wall and shattered to pieces— irreplaceable and ultimately thrown away and forgotten. Although she’s in my life now, I still miss the woman who tried to raise me. I’ll never get to see her again.

            My father started dating again when I was about 10 and he found her to be a wonderful woman with a good head on her shoulders that he could love, unlike my mother. I thought she was an awful woman who sought to do nothing more than replace my mother. The very thought of her lit a fire within me. He believed he had found someone permanent after only a few short months of dating her and one of the best moments in his life quickly became one of the darkest in my own. 

            In high school, for the first time in my life I met people who genuinely believed in and cared about me. Since then I’ve been determined to be something more than just another statistic. I don’t’ want to be just another victim that ended her life or another at risk child who couldn’t push herself hard enough to succeed. During my junior year I took two AP classes and managed to pass both of my tests. Although it was a lot of work, the experience was well worth it, because I learned to push myself and met incredible people that changed my life forever. That summer I was chosen for Subiendo Academy at UT Austin, a week long opportunity to work in an environment that encouraged my ambitions and taught me to turn weaknesses into strengths. I’ve realized through the brutalities of my life I’ve come out with a fire burning under me, an undying desire to create something beautiful out of the shambles presented to me. In the future, I hope to study education because it was teachers that helped me most in life so far, I want to be that person for someone else in the future. If more children had the kinds of people I have in my life now, then I could prevent them from being a statistic as well. If I could help even one person, then all of my life’s pain would have been worth it because I made a world of a difference for them.