Wanting to submit tonight...is this too "feel sorry for me?"
Posted: Fri Jan 15, 2010 4:44 am
Hey y'all! I didn't know scholarship deadlines were sooner than regular deadlines, so now I have to submit this thing by tonight. I don't want to make this sound like a sob story. Please tell me if it is and let me know if there is anything that needs to be changed about it! ANY feedback is appreciate...be brutal.
“You can do it,” she said. “Just put one foot in front of the other.”
I looked down at the tiny woman who barely cleared my shoulder, the one who was literally supposed to catch me should I fall, and said with mortification, “No, I can’t.”
After all, I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. I had forgotten how to walk. Me - the girl who prided herself on rarely needing help and certainly never asking for it. But now, I was relying on a 5 foot, 100-pound physical therapist to make sure my face didn’t acquaint itself with the floor.
Three months earlier, my mother was driving my sister and I back to our college after Thanksgiving break and, due to heavy rain and wet roads, our car hydroplaned and flipped over. My sister walked away with a few scratches. My mother and I didn’t walk away at all – both my legs were crushed and my mother didn’t survive the accident. For almost two months, I was immobile. I had to drop out of the rest of the semester and was on bed rest. I was appalled that life went on for the rest of the world. How could it? How dare it?
I was stuck in bed, alone in the house for long hours until someone came home from work. If I needed something that wasn’t within arm’s reach, I would have to make do without it. And, worst of all, the girl who was previously a one-woman show had to rely almost completely on others. Not only did I hate my dependency, I hated the stress it put on my family. After fighting long and hard with my father about the decision, I tried to go back to college the next semester. After a physically and mentally exhausting week back, I realized my body just wasn’t strong enough yet. I needed to heal.
My physical therapy courses were grueling. Even simple things like lifting my leg or circling my ankles were excruciating. I remember one particularly tough day I had when I realized that I was unable to bend my knees or even curl my toes without crying from the pain of it. Walking was a whole different story – a distant dream, it seemed to me. After about a month and a half in a wheelchair, I graduated to a walker. I wasn’t strong enough for crutches for another month and a half after that. The day I took my first step without any aid, my hand lingering over the couch should I need its support, was a quiet, bittersweet victory for me. The one person I would have wanted to smile at in triumph most of all was not there, but I could almost feel see her looking down at me proudly.
Most people say thank you to their waiters, their baristas, and their doormen without thinking twice about it, but it seems like the people we truly need to be grateful to are the ones that are the last to know. I wish I had thanked my mother for raising me the way she did. She demanded excellence and perseverance, simply because she knew we were capable of it. And, because of her certainty, my sister and I grew up accepting nothing less than that from ourselves. Not only was she proud of us, we have grown to be proud of ourselves.
And, I’m proud to say that despite how hard it was – seemingly impossible to me – I fully recovered physically from the accident and, despite taking a semester off, still graduated from college in four years. While recovering from my accident, I had made sure to catch up on the work I needed to do in order to get credit for the classes I had to leave. I also took a full load of summer school courses to make up for what I missed – I ended up over-compensating, which, in turn, led me to have a wonderfully peaceful last semester.
When I started thinking about my future, law school was the immediate and obvious answer. It had always been “the plan” – my mom had been a lawyer and I’ve always unconsciously followed in her footsteps. I finally asked myself why I want to practice law – was it only because of mom or only because it was “the plan?” To be honest, the answer was muddled – “the plan” was a big part of the reason, but mainly, it was because of my mom’s passion for the law and the things I learned from her because of it. She loved speaking for those who didn’t have a voice. She loved doing right, even if she had to hammer it in. And she never stopped trying. She wasn’t trying to change the world, and neither am I, but we never ruled it out, either. Luckily, those footsteps I found easy to follow – even when I couldn’t walk.
“You can do it,” she said. “Just put one foot in front of the other.”
I looked down at the tiny woman who barely cleared my shoulder, the one who was literally supposed to catch me should I fall, and said with mortification, “No, I can’t.”
After all, I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. I had forgotten how to walk. Me - the girl who prided herself on rarely needing help and certainly never asking for it. But now, I was relying on a 5 foot, 100-pound physical therapist to make sure my face didn’t acquaint itself with the floor.
Three months earlier, my mother was driving my sister and I back to our college after Thanksgiving break and, due to heavy rain and wet roads, our car hydroplaned and flipped over. My sister walked away with a few scratches. My mother and I didn’t walk away at all – both my legs were crushed and my mother didn’t survive the accident. For almost two months, I was immobile. I had to drop out of the rest of the semester and was on bed rest. I was appalled that life went on for the rest of the world. How could it? How dare it?
I was stuck in bed, alone in the house for long hours until someone came home from work. If I needed something that wasn’t within arm’s reach, I would have to make do without it. And, worst of all, the girl who was previously a one-woman show had to rely almost completely on others. Not only did I hate my dependency, I hated the stress it put on my family. After fighting long and hard with my father about the decision, I tried to go back to college the next semester. After a physically and mentally exhausting week back, I realized my body just wasn’t strong enough yet. I needed to heal.
My physical therapy courses were grueling. Even simple things like lifting my leg or circling my ankles were excruciating. I remember one particularly tough day I had when I realized that I was unable to bend my knees or even curl my toes without crying from the pain of it. Walking was a whole different story – a distant dream, it seemed to me. After about a month and a half in a wheelchair, I graduated to a walker. I wasn’t strong enough for crutches for another month and a half after that. The day I took my first step without any aid, my hand lingering over the couch should I need its support, was a quiet, bittersweet victory for me. The one person I would have wanted to smile at in triumph most of all was not there, but I could almost feel see her looking down at me proudly.
Most people say thank you to their waiters, their baristas, and their doormen without thinking twice about it, but it seems like the people we truly need to be grateful to are the ones that are the last to know. I wish I had thanked my mother for raising me the way she did. She demanded excellence and perseverance, simply because she knew we were capable of it. And, because of her certainty, my sister and I grew up accepting nothing less than that from ourselves. Not only was she proud of us, we have grown to be proud of ourselves.
And, I’m proud to say that despite how hard it was – seemingly impossible to me – I fully recovered physically from the accident and, despite taking a semester off, still graduated from college in four years. While recovering from my accident, I had made sure to catch up on the work I needed to do in order to get credit for the classes I had to leave. I also took a full load of summer school courses to make up for what I missed – I ended up over-compensating, which, in turn, led me to have a wonderfully peaceful last semester.
When I started thinking about my future, law school was the immediate and obvious answer. It had always been “the plan” – my mom had been a lawyer and I’ve always unconsciously followed in her footsteps. I finally asked myself why I want to practice law – was it only because of mom or only because it was “the plan?” To be honest, the answer was muddled – “the plan” was a big part of the reason, but mainly, it was because of my mom’s passion for the law and the things I learned from her because of it. She loved speaking for those who didn’t have a voice. She loved doing right, even if she had to hammer it in. And she never stopped trying. She wasn’t trying to change the world, and neither am I, but we never ruled it out, either. Luckily, those footsteps I found easy to follow – even when I couldn’t walk.
