Hairpin turn

         Hairpin Turn is a place where I can feel perfectly content with myself no matter what time of day it is. It is a place where I experience something new every time I go, and I love that about this place. I especially love going up there at night when not a single sole is around. The car ride just by itself is something I can always look forward to. One of my favorite things to do is listening to the bass of my car vibrate in the quietness of the night. This specific morning however, I decided to switch things up and watch the sunrise rather than the sunset. It is something that I now will continue to do. The crisp air, and hazy colored skies, mixed with the smell of car exhaust created the perfect atmosphere for the start to my day. I love coming to this place when I need to study, if I ever need a break from reviewing my notes I can just look up and see the mountains overlapping each other for miles and miles ahead of me.  I can always rely on this place when I'm having a bad day and need an escape from reality. When I'm up here I can let any thoughts or emotions spill out of my head and it always helps to know that I have this place to go to whenever I need it. Whether the sky is shedding droplets onto my car, or the sun is blinding my eyes, Hairpin Turn is a place I can always feel content.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWY3jfsM250

Coming of Age

When it comes to thinking about my transition from childhood to adulthood, there is one specific event in my life that stands out to me the most. This event occurred five years ago, and thinking about how much has changed since then is crazy to me. When I was around 13 years old and only a couple months into 7th grade, my mom had told me that we would be moving to New York, approximately 1,300 miles away from where I had been living. This news was a lot to take in, but since I was only 13, I was excited for what New York had to offer. When I thought of New York, I immediately thought of the "big apple" and how millions of people dreamt of visiting this place that I would soon be living near. Celebrities, lights, and Broadway Shows are what came to my mind, and for a while it kept me from thinking about moving away from my life and into a completely new one. Although I was excited, the realization of what was about to be happening in a couple of months started to sink in.

Not only did I realize I would be leaving all of my old friends, but I would have to be making all new ones. Although this wasn't the first time I was going to be the new kid, it starts to become a lot harder to fit in the older you are. Our moving date was set in November which was a bit of a scare to me because that had meant school was already in session for a couple of months. I thought that if I arrived it would be even more difficult to fit in because I would't be coming the same time all the other new kids were coming. These worries began piling up, and I wasn't as excited for the move than I had been initially. My mom would reassure me that New York would offer so many more opportunities and that it would be a great thing to be living so close to my older sister. I trusted her and within a couple weeks of finding out about the move, we had our moving truck packed and hit the road for the 21 hour drive. 

I would have thought that leaving behind my old life would be the most difficult part, but looking back at it now it wasn't. The hardest part for me was dealing with the responsibilities that  I had to take on after the move. My mom being a single mom needed my help a lot of the time because she couldn't possibly juggle so many things at once. Between a new home, new job, enrolling me in school, unpacking, and doing the daily duties that a mom does, she was quickly becoming overwhelmed and stressed out. I had to really step up my game during this time in my life because I needed to start doing things I had never had the responsibility of doing before. Things like doing my own laundry, making my own food for myself, and helping more than I ever had with household chores was difficult for me at my young age. The only thing I had been focusing on as a 13 year old was getting people to like me. Trying to fit into a grade that was three times the size of my old grade was quite the challenge, but I am so grateful that making new friends wasn't as difficult as I expected. 

Looking back, the difficulties I went through when moving across the country only helped me tremendously when growing as a person. I had gone from living on a dairy farm in a town of 3,000 people to living only an hour and a half away from one of the biggest cities in the world. Not only was the culture different, but the people were as well. I found that people in New York are open minded to change, and willing to express their creativity without being afraid of what others think. This inspired me and  essentially helped me become a more well rounded person than I was before. I was able to express myself in ways I had never had been able to do before and it was such a breath of fresh air. Although the move was one of the hardest things I have done in my lifetime, it was one of the best things that I have done in my lifetime.