The Trials and Tribulations Faced In One’s Youth
My life has been filled throughout with influences both good and bad. My high school, although plain and simple from the outside, was anything but on the inside. My high school was known for its academic excellence and its more flush attendance area. But, few not and even some who were associated with my school knew of the problem within. A problem that would even be ignored even when it came right to the forefront of the local news. I never knew that drugs could become such a large part of my life, even without doing them. I never expected to ever find myself in trouble in a drug related incident. But, throughout my time in high school I just did what every other person did and ignored it. But I escaped the problem, others weren’t as lucky.
My whole life I could not wait to get to high school. I guess it was always conveyed to me to be the best years of my life. So you can imagine how ecstatic I was to finally began attending Sabino High School in Tucson, Arizona. Home to around fifteen hundred or so students. A school set in a nice community, that was always supportive. It always had much parent backing, and the test scores from the school were some of the best in the state, competing with those scores of private schools. There was a problem though, one that would be ignored throughout my class’ tenure there.
As a senior I found myself trapped in a school filled with narcotic sales and use. I even found some of my closest friends involved, and none of them were left with a care in the world. My best friend Zane kept his problem from me. It was not until later that he would admit to participating in any sort of drug activity. He would later tell me that throughout our junior year he used cocaine regularly. I knew nothing of this, and as his best friend worried about him when I did find out. I remember being so mad when he told me about his use of cocaine for that year because people would always tell me that they heard that he was doing it, and I always stuck for him and said that it was a lie.
Throughout “Chasing the Scream” many intriguing stories are told from individuals involved in the drug war, those on the outside of the drug war, and stories about those who got abused by the drug war. Addiction has many social causes that address drug use and the different effects that it has on different people. In our previous history we would see a tremendous amount of individuals able to work and live satisfying lives after consuming a drug. After the Harrison Act, drugs were abolished all at once, but it lead to human desperation so instead of improving our society, we are often the reason to the problem. We constantly look at addicts as the bad guys when other individuals are often the reasons and influences to someone’s decision in
Drugs are not only a problem for older generations, but often times those in younger generations become involved in the drug trade as well. According to Anderson (1990), “Children who become deeply engaged in t...
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. His poems are not what they seem to be at first glance. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.
A drug is a substance that alters the mind, body or both. Drug use is an increasing problem among teenagers in colleges today. Most drug use begins in the preteen and teenage years, the years most crucial in the maturation process (Shiromoto 5). During these years adolescents are faced with difficult tasks of discovering their self identity, clarifying their sexual roles, assenting independence, learning to cope with authority and searching for goals that would give their lives meaning. Drugs are readily available, adolescents are curious and venerable, and there is peer pressure to experiment, and there is a temptation to escape from conflicts. The use of drugs by teenagers is the result of a combination of factors such as peer pressure, curiosity, and availability. Drugs addiction among adolescents in turn lead to depression and suicide (Shiromoto 12).
Robert Frost is considered by many to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Frost’s work has been regarded by many as unique. Frost’s poems mainly take place in nature, and it is through nature that he uses sense appealing-vocabulary to immerse the reader into the poem. In the poem, “Hardwood Groves”, Frost uses a Hardwood Tree that is losing its leaves as a symbol of life’s vicissitudes. “Frost recognizes that before things in life are raised up, they must fall down” (Bloom 22).
The poems “Mr. Flood’s Party” written by Edwin Arlington Robinson and “Birches” written by Robert Frost both show the passage of time quite vividly through the use of imagery. Robinson’s words show how the main character, Mr. Eben Flood, is acting one night while being drunk. Frost, on the other hand, is giving the picture of a little boy playing in the branches of a birch tree just as Frost had done in his childhood. The aspect of loneliness is also seen in both poems. Mr. Eben Flood, main character of “Mr. Flood’s Party”, has outlived many of his friends resulting in his drinking and loneliness. In the poem “Birches”, Frost shows the aspect of loneliness by writing about the boy’s childhood and how he only played with himself due to being
Choices are the main theme of this poem. The speaker realizes the choice he is about to make is going to affect his future. The point of this poem is that the speaker will not know his future until it happens. Nature and roads are said to be symbols that are very important to the speaker. It helps the reader understand why he choose the path he took. The fork at the road represents the speaker’s life. The title “The Road Not Taken” means that not all choices that one comes to are going to be easy and not all are going to be the right choice, but one has to make them at some point in life. When it comes to difficult situations like this it its not always best to take the one more traveled but the one best for them, but choose wisely.
My first memories of my father were what I now know as active addiction, I would watch the chaos in my house, the abuse, both mental and physical and at the time I didn’t understand but as time went on it was apparent, at the age of 11, my father hung himself, although he did not die he cut off oxygen to his brain long enough to render him blind and incompetent to care for himself and he was place in a nursing home where he would reside for the next 25 years of my life. I swore I would never do drugs because I saw firsthand the destruction, but my family addiction did not stop there. My aunt was a daily drinker, my uncle was addicted to heroin, another aunt addicted to crack
To begin with, a poem that represents Frost’s childhood is “A Peck of Gold.” Robert Frost once said, “But I was one of the children told / some of the dust was really gold” (Frost 7-8). This poem talks about Frost’s walks with his mother around the city. He lived in San Francisco and would notice the Golden Gate Bridge and the lasting impacts of the Gold Rush on the town as he walked. As Frost noticed these things, he would come to the conclusion that some of the things he saw must really be made of gold. This poem is able to show how mystified Frost was by the city in which he lived. It also shows just how close he and his mother were. Just as “A Peck of Gold” represented his childhood, the poem “Birches” does as well.
The ditching was the routine of my days, and drugs were only consuming the life out of me. It was horrible, having to rely on something that you know you cannot always have. Luckily, I was not living it alone, and all my friends were there with me. Now, none of them are. I stand alone and I simply wished to get out of the society around me infested with drugs and misfortune. I hated it, with the deepest resentment. Why did I have to live in the world where everyone only worries about drugs and money, why couldn 't the adversity around me simply go away and let me be successful. I finally realized what was happening and when I did, I made one of the best decisions a freshman can make in their life, which was to go to school. For me, the second semester shows the better side of me; the Raul that actually goes to school and tries. I am not mentally incapable of performing at the university level, I was always a smart student. However, it happened again. I started missing school, but this time I reached my lowest point ever. I followed a series of bad paths that made me end up in jail. Again, it is really disappointing to fail to succeed and meeting the face of failure once
A few years ago, my community’s city and county schools were merged, and my small class size of fifty people was quadrupled. Suddenly, instead of seeing the same faces every day, I was struggling down the hallway while trying to avoid the hundreds of students I had never seen before. The first year after the merge, I met many new people, a few of which were involved with things I had never imagined high school students would be involved with. At first, all I noticed were cigarettes and vaporizers being used behind teachers’ backs, but then I began to notice more and more illegal substances being used. A growing problem in the small community of Wayne County, Kentucky is the use and abuse of drugs by teenagers.
Growing up in Reading, Pennsylvania being raised in a lower class neighborhood by my maternal grandmother, I did not realize how different my life was from those outside my community. It was normal for me to see empty drug baggies on the ground, people coping drugs on the corner, condemned/ abandoned homes, and crime. As I got older and my network of people grew, I started to notice some differences. However, it was not until I left the area at age 18 to attend college did I fully realize that my "normal" was not the "normal." Most people I knew growing up were struggling with finances and had one or both parents addicted to drugs or alcohol and mines were no different. The 80s crack epidemic hit my family hard and by the end of that era my mother and 6 of her siblings were all addicted.
Before being capable of fighting the use of drugs and alchol, one must come to an understanding of why some people use drugs. The decision to ultimately use drugs is influenced mainly in childhood. Whether in a poor ?ghetto? neighborhood, or in a middle-class suburb, all children are vulnerable to the abuse of drugs. Most high-risk children are effected by personal and family circumstances (Falco 51). If a child?s parents are substance abusers, then it is a fairly safe prediction that the child will abuse drugs later in life. Also, early-life experiments with drugs greatly increases the chance of abuse later in life. Academic problems, and rebellious, anti-social behavior in elementary school are also linked to drug problems, in addition to truancy, delinquency, and ear...
Norma Bourland: Our son started using drugs when he was 14 years old. We had just moved to another state for the second time in two years, after living overseas as missionaries for the first 12 years of our son’s life. This was a lot for all of us in our family to handle, especially for an adolescent. Because my husband was the pastor of a small evangelical church, we lived on a limited budget, whereas our new community was very affluent. Our son’s new high school was huge, with about three thousand students. He was the youngest one on his soccer team, and although he was very skilled because he had been playing almost from the time he was born, he had a bit of an accent and was unsure of American ways. So he kind of stood
My physical development was not so difficult for me. I experienced the growth spurt when I was10 to 15-years old. I didn’t think it was difficult time for me because my range of growth spurt was not so large. Additionally, I did not belong to sports club, so I did not feel uncomfortable when I move my body. I think I am a late bloomer because I have never had boyfriend. But I think it is advantage for me because I am not a “boy-crazy”. I know some friends who are early bloomer and being “boy-crazy”, I do not want to be like them. I have my own interest and I have something what I want to do besides dating with boys. My physical developments have some effects on my character of today. I think it is because I was taller than others since very young, my friends often said to me “you are like my elder sister.” This phrase makes me think that I need to be like elder sister when I was child. It is related to more about psychological development, but this way of thinking came from my height. One of other physical development related issue that makes me struggle is my period. Every time I am in period, I have pain in stomach and back; I feel sleepy, hungry, and irritating; and I have skin problems. I think there are more people who have more heavy symptoms of period, however, sometimes I cannot endure these. My physical developments have some effects on me, but it was not so difficult for me to pass through.