“When you get older and you get a job and a home to live in, you are going to have to learn how to be able to do work by yourself, at work, and at home.” My father told me this a few weeks ago and i have to say, this has effected me and I will continue to  for the rest of my life. This is where I learned the lesson of being independent.

A few days after my dad talked about me about doing work by myself, he puts me up to an assignment that I have never done before. My father asks me to paint the guest room in our house. I have never painted a room in my life. Since he wanted to help me for the future he just told me don’t rush trying to finish. I was in a large room, completely empty, just waiting for me to go and paint. You could smell the paint. It smelt like car exhaust and a mixture of a flower but not as pleasant. I would not let that smell let me down from what I had to do. I had to start of with figuring out where and how I should start. I start off with the side of the room that is farthest away from the hallway. Normally, i would have to ask someone for help but this time i knew my dad wanted to test me so i started to run the brush with long strokes up and down the wall with white paint. I continue to do this with the rest of the wall and I realize that some of the paint is on the baseboard of the wall. I didn’t think this was right so I went to the garage to find some tape to cover over the baseboard. At the time this was just what had immediately thought was the solution to the problem. I do this with the rest of the baseboard of the walls and about a half hour later i finish with the walls. I go outside to tell my dad and he comes inside to see. The facial expression of him being surprised immediately came on his face. He had told me “I knew you could do it”. I didn’t think much of what he said but as time went on i realized that those words meant alot to me. This was the first moment i have done something this big by myself.

About one month ago, I was sitting in my room with my little brother, we were playing a gamer with each other and my father comes in the room and says he needs me downstairs and help him with something. I go downstairs and he leads me to the garage. Since we have moved in not to long ago and we have a lot of things to unpack he needs me to start unpacking some of the boxes. At first i didn’t think that it was going to be that hard so i get straight to getting the boxes open. My dad leaves the garage and i am left by myself. With only one light that works half of the room was dark and kind of mysterious. I start opening my first my first and i see something that i have never seen before. I see a box full of collectable knives that (I was guessing) my dad had kept from his years in the military. Since i have never seen these placed anywhere in our house I start to think “My dad would most likely try to look for other things that are related to the knives”. I never wondered what the knives were for, I just went along with what i was doing not wondering what these were for or why they were here. I look around the house and I find a statue that is about a foot tall and half a cylinder hund on the wall with a nail and a piece to hand on to. I think that this is something my dad wanted to keep. He got that from my aunt so in my mind I thought that this has to be where this goes. I start to get about halfway done with the heavy boxes, which are about ten to twenty pounds each, and I get to a box with clothes from when my father was in highschool. I make the decision of having to put these with my father clothes that he has now. This may seem to be a little task but I took a lot of time and effort to lift and figure out where the things I have never seen before.

One day in December I had broken my bed and I had told my dad and he got upset at first but then he realized that I needed to learn how to do this if i ever have kids that need to help fix a bed for them. At this time i was scared because i thought that if I were to mess this up then i might be sleeping one night and my bed might break and i could get hurt. I had to get over that so i just wanted to get this over with so i went ahead and examined the bed and the part that broke making me fall. I had little experience with fixing beds so i just had to figure it out on my own. I sat in silence. Trying to take time to think about how i could do this and i finally figured out that all i had to do was take a part the entire bed and recreate the way my dad did when he first put the bed in my room with my help. The bed was around 50 pounds and the rest of the pieces were about 10 pounds each. It was mainly me thinking that the task was more complicated. My father got me to learn not to overthink work that is very simple. Within the next week the bed broke again but this time there was no way to fix it, so i had to get a different bed anyway.

From these experiences i got to learn a few simple lessons from things like fixing a bed, unboxing, and painting a wall. Some people say that little things don’t mean a lot but I like to say that no matter how small the job it can have a big impact on you and anyone else you can teach in the future. By these experiences i got to learn the lesson of working independently and not to overthink what life brings to you as something simple.