Puzzle enthusiast… dog walker… animal lover… are easy phrases that I could use to describe myself. There are some other phrases that define my personality… positive, kind, and hardworking. Or phrases that describe my accomplishments… double major, Dean’s List, and a university student.
But when asked the question: Who am I? It is easy to feel like a certain amount of accomplishments or memories defines my ability to describe myself.
In truth, I am a positive person, with a glass half-full attitude because my mother taught me that positivity would help me keep my mental health from slipping into depression. I am kind because, like most people who have experienced unkindness, being treated poorly doesn’t feel good. And I am hardworking because I grew up in a family that needed help, and I was prepared at a young age.
If I had to pick one moment though, to describe who I am, it would be the seventeenth day of September at nearly 1:15 p.m. University life in-person, a new job within the university, setting up an event, struggling to befriend my co-workers, and making time for lunch with my dad had been on my mind all day. Just before the event, a co-worker and incredible friend of mine noticed that I had been struggling balancing school, work, and family and offered me a shoulder to lean on.
Truthfully, they had offered me a shoulder to cry on because I didn’t last more than a few minutes describing my struggles before I started bawling from the stress of it all. It was within that moment of my co-worker trying to comfort me that we went over all of the different forms of aid that I could find. Through counseling, through friends, through family, through university leadership, or through any means possible would provide aid and support to me throughout the year.
From that point forward, I began to identify when I felt myself slipping and struggling through different situations, and puzzling out how to solve these issues. When classes were difficult, I went to office hours. When family was too difficult to visit during the week, we communicated and rescheduled our plans. When friends were hard to come by, I found people who wanted to be around me. The solutions to my problems had been easy to find once I realized that I wanted to rectify these issues. In those moments of finding an answer to my problem, I realized that I am a strong, and open-minded person who is willing to accept change in order to amend difficult situations.