To this day, there are only three specific things I remember about the morning of August 20, 2013: the hundred degree concrete of my driveway under my bare feet, the overwhelming amount of posters I had on my bedroom walls, and the sadness in my mom’s voice when she told me that she had been laid off. Life for us had been pretty congenial up until that day; I was preparing to start my freshman year of high school and she was well on her way to becoming a teacher, when out of the blue her boss threw a wrench into every single one of our plans. You see, as the unscripted version of this story goes, I got angry – well angry may be a bit of an understatement, livid is more along the lines of how anyone else would have described me. I knew that with my mom’s newly given lack of income that I would be moving again (this would be the fifth time I had moved since the beginning of sixth grade). My mother, who at that time related with my pain, allowed me to invite my four closest friends over and we spent the majority of the night reminiscing over our past year together – there were many tears and laughs throughout the night. My friends had hope that everything would be fixed before the school year started; I, however, knew better than to hope for something that I already knew the outcome of. My family was packed and prepared to move before the week was over. 

Immediately, my mother enrolled me in the school down the street from my dad’s house; although, I would like to be one of the many people who say that their freshman year was the best year of high school, it was the exact opposite for me. School was already three weeks into the year at my new school and everybody had already discovered who they would be hanging out with for the next four years of their lives – it was too late for me to discover it with them. For weeks, I struggled with undemanding, everyday tasks; I was too wrapped up in the idea of maintaining my friendships with people who lived fifty miles away from me, but what was to me trying my best to maintain my friendships was the exact opposite to said friends. Group chats that used to be filled with horrible jokes and constant laughing were now filled with angry words, superficial apologies, and tear stained cheeks. Without my friends, I fell prey to a new, dark world that on some days left me crying in my room at two-thirty in the morning. Eventually, my mom noticed the drastic change in my behavior and agreed to letting me be homeschooled for the remainder of the school year – my dad was not happy in the slightest with this decision and I spent many nights listening to my parents quarrel over the decision.

I attended two online schools in the remaining nine months of the school year. The first school required an essay and an interview before students were given the yes or no; my nerves shot through the roof throughout the interview, but I ended up getting accepted immediately – to say I was proud of myself would be an understatement. Everything about this school was well and dandy until second semester started and the lack of income on my mom’s part kicked into effect; the school wanted me to come in a couple times during the week, and we could no longer afford the gas needed for transportation. From there, my mom enrolled me in another online school based off of a recommendation she got from my aunt. My parents quarreled even more about this school because it was completely online and left a lot of space for procrastination. Ultimately, I promised that if my grades were not all a’s at the end of the semester that I would go back to public school, which is how I ended up in the great city of Yucaipa.    

Now, here I am three years and four schools later sitting at a table in a basically empty room wishing I could thank my mom’s old boss for being the one grain of rice I needed to tip my scale. That one grain of rice may have wrecked havoc in my life, but the scale in due course balanced itself out again and I will be the first to say that it made me stronger, ultimately happier person.