Who am I?

Who am I?

I am a free-willed person. Someone who cannot be defined. My family and my peers do not even know the true me. They each have a different view of my personality, what they think I like, and who I really am as a person. Even though their views may be similar they are different, because I cannot be defined.

My beliefs have shaped who I am since I was a young girl. My family has been the church going kind of family for generations. That fact has not changed even with the addition of four kids to my parent’s household. For many families going to church has become a thing of the past. This sad trend has skipped my family thankfully. Each Sunday all six of us make the trek from our country house to the church we call home in Grand Island. There we devote our time to praising God and catching up with family and old friends after the service. If my faith was not enough to keep me going through life, I know that my family would be plenty to get me through the rough patches of life.

I am a determined individual who has not allowed anything to stop me. Through several injuries to my leg I have continued to think positively. Each injury presented a different challenge. The first time I fractured my leg I was only an eighth grader. I did not care about the details of the break; all I cared about was the color of my cast (purple) and how I was going to continue all of my activities in a wheel chair. Both of these things were not important as I look back on my past, but in the mind of an eighth grade girl I was completely stressed about these issues. Give or take a year I was presented with another problem. I then had a stress fracture in the same spot of the previous break. Again I was pronounced crippled and given crutches to carry myself around. In the heat of summer this was not the most comfortable situation. I then had to worry about what I could wear with crutches and how was I going to ever play softball again. This is where the determination starts to set in. I was so sick of being side-lined because of my unforgiving leg that I was not going to let anyone stop me from playing softball ever again. I set out with this in mind after this last break. Only to find another fracture shortly after I was released to run. This was only a set back, I knew that I could get over this one as well. It came with  a lot of hard work and early mornings of physical therapy, but I was finally pronounced eligible to play softball one week before the season was set to start my Junior year. It may have been painful and at most times the complete opposite of fun, but it helped to shape me into the person that I am. It has given me a different standard to determination. 

My determination was not just raised from the hardships of breaking my leg, but also from the ideals that my parents instilled in me as I grew up on a farm. My dad knows that real definition of hard work and he taught me that through out my summers working on the farm right beside him. There is no room for being lazy and a day's work means getting up before the sun rises and getting home after it goes down. He showed me that with a good work ethic you can virtually do anything. My dad has helped raise his father’s small cattle operation into a large feedlot that is successful beyond anyone’s imagination. Of course, he did not do this alone, but with the determination and a good work ethic he was able to make a change for the better. I can only hope to be as successful and full of as many good intentions as my father.

I have mentioned who I am now and where I have been but I have failed to narrow in on where I would like to go in my life and who I want to become. I am that small town girl who dreams big. The girl that wants to do something others have told her she cannot do. In the next few years my college experience at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln will shape me into who I will be for the rest of my life. I hope to become a large animal veterinarian. With a college environment surrounding me in the next few years I hope that my dream will be complete and I will become the person I want to be. I do know that if my life tends to lead me down a different path it will be the right one. I have a strong enough faith to know this is true.