A lot of young adults take some remarkable things Essays

A lot of young adults take some remarkable things in their lives for granted. Many kids my age do not have to worry about paying for school on their own, not having a good support system at home, being diagnosed with a mental illness and being completely unequipped to handle it, et cetera. On top of that, many of the kids that do experience things like this do not necessarily see their lives drastically change overnight, do n o t usually have to find ways to cope with them alone. Ultimately, I have lived a life full of many of these twists and turns, and the things I have experienced have contributed to my personal growth in some very marked and dramatic ways. I am proud to say that I feel I have come out of it as a stronger, self-aware, empathetic, and driven person who sincerely wants to make the best of myself, and any given situation. When I was 10 years old, my parents divorced. At the time, I really was not able to comprehend the dramatic way my life was about to be uprooted. By age 13, I had moved five times around the tri-state area. During those years, I was constantly navigating new schools, new friends, and new family dynamics. In addition to that, all the while my parents were having a particularly vitriolic custody battle over my sister and me. My sister and I witnessed our parents constantly saying horrible things about each other, using whatever they could against each other in court, and ultimately trying to turn the two of us against the other parent. In the custody battle, my father spent both mine and my sister's college funds, to pay the legal fees, ultimately winning full custody of the two of us. After this, for a long period of time I was angry with my mother, because I believed all the horrible things my father would tell me she was doing or had done. Eventually, I let go of m y anger for my mother, and then became angry at my father for a similar lengthy period. Where many children had a stable, loving home life, I consistently felt uprooted, out of place, and alienated from both my parents. Looking back, I feel like I never had stability in my childhood. As with many children of divorce, problems of insecurity and feeling a general lack of stability are far from uncommon. Even after the dust settled from the custody battle, still not everything was at peace. Some years later my father remarried, a nd they would remain so for several years during my late teens. Unfortunately, my relationship with my step-mother proved to be tenuous . Eventually, tensions became so high that I moved out of my father's house when I was 18, after a particularly heated argument that escalated. This put even more strain on my relationship with my father, and I can sincerely say that at this point in my life I felt lost. I felt as if my life would never go anywhere, at the time I lacked a proper support system to put myself through college, and I struggled with my own mental health. I felt as if I was uprooting my whole life, yet again. This was a parti cularly low point in my life, and I felt as if I had no one to turn to, and that I would have no future to speak of. All of my friends were beginning college, and meanwhile I was working 40 hours a week, wondering where I would be living. I retreated internally within myself, and felt isolated from my frien ds and family for a long time. A few years ago, I was diagnosed with Anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, or OCD. Admittedly, even acknowledging the fact that I had a disorder such as O CD was incredibly scary , but in retrospect, this was really the turning point in my life. I realized that if I was go ing to improve myself , I couldn't define myself by mental illness, or by the troubled childhood that I had had. I took a good hard look at myself, and resolved to do