Perseverance, a word that has been used frequently throughout my life, through many different situations, for good and bad. Perseverance means having persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success. This is why perseverance is such an important quality to have and why so many people want to have it. Throughout my life I have had to persevere through many different obstacles with sports, family, and school but the one thing that has changed me into the person I am today is the amount of times I have had to persevere through the challenges of moving two a foreign place. 

As my younger ages started to fade and I started to have a mind of my own as a kid I started to realize how unusual it was that I had lived in over ten places at just the age of 13. Furthermore, all of my family and previous friends had become almost strangers. This started to bother me and I started to think about all of the hard times I had to go through, the school days knowing no one and the feeling of missing your best friend. Although I thought this I had now lived in Texas for three years and had started to make connections with people that I was hoping to last for a while. So though I did continue to think about how tough that was in the beginning I was starting to hope that now that I was older that it would start to change and I would start to get a chance to be a normal kid and just live in one place for a while. Then one sunny summer afternoon in Texas I was out in the street playing with some of my neighbors and friends when I had heard my Dad call me into the house. He sat me and my sister Kate down for a family meeting and I didn’t think much of it. I was just excited to get back to playing my game in the street. Little did I know that this conversation was going to throw another obstacle into my life. My Dad told us that he had received an offer to coach in Wisconsin that would offer better pay and opportunity to coach in the NHL. This meant that once again we were going to have to pack our bags and mover for my Dad’s job. 

As you can imagine I was very tired of moving at that point of my life and was done persevering through this same situation over and over again. This is why this move was a very hard one when it came to my mental state and well being. Saying goodbye to all of my friends was one of the hardest things I’ve had to do as I think as you get older the bonds you make with more people begin to become more real. This put my mind set into a sort of shut down mode as all I could think about is what I was leaving behind and not what I was going to gain from moving. When the day finally came and we did move I was devastated and very stubborn towards my parents for making me do so. When we finally got to Wisconsin for the first time I think everyone was a little overwhelmed with the fact that we had actually just moved again. The move affected me in the way that I didn’t want to go outside and that I just sat in my basement playing video games all day. This then became bad for my mental and physical state so my parents pushed me towards getting involved in hockey which is a big part of my life. I agreed but with hesitancy as though I loved hockey the worst feeling in the world is walking into some place where everyone knows everyone and you don’t know anyone and no one knows you. Though it was hard I summoned some courage and did it. The result was some hope brought into my life that maybe the situation would get better in the future. This little piece of hope gave me the courage to do more things and meet more people that made the move a lot easier for me.

Regardless of how hard the moves were on me they had left a lasting effect on me for the better. As I had learned skills that many people will never learn throughout their life through hard experiences that I had to persevere to get through. These moves taught me the importance of pushing through hard times with the thought that they will get better because in the end it will. The moves also taught me social skills that I use every day and that help me get to meet new and interesting people. Finally the moves taught me that doing something to get yourself out of a bad spot in your life is going to help you a lot more than doing nothing. Furthermore, that doing something is always better than doing nothing and feeling sorry for yourself.