EDF 2085 Reflection Paper #2

Jackie Lawrence
Reflection Paper # 2
EDF 2085

“When we reinvent ourselves, we take our life experiences and transmute these base metals into gold -- the truth about who and what we are and what we are capable of doing.” This quote is absolutely beautiful and has somehow managed to sum my entire life story into a nice little package. Transformation has been the core of who I am today and who I am proudly becoming. After high school, it was necessary to take years off and reinvent and renovate my soul. It was scary, and it was hard. Growing up, I was raised well. My upper-middle class family taught me values such as honor, loyalty, honesty and pride. My strong foundation encouraged me to respect those who were educated and hard working. I aspired to be that way one day myself, but somewhere along my path I became lost. Self-esteem and confidence were above me. After a lot of hard work, I finally began to learn that my base metals were still good enough to one day become gold.
Tolerance, acceptance, and compassion have, luckily, never really been an issue for me when it comes to young people and other cultures. The way I see it, I have been to the bottom and back, so who am I to be judgmental of others? On the contrary, it is now my life mission to help those in need. I have become passionate about working with high school students that are on their way to becoming lost. I hope I can one day be the positive influence for someone else I so badly needed at that fragile time. If this isn’t transformation, recovery, and renovation, then I don’t know what is.
However, in my place of employment, it has sometimes been difficult for me to display tolerance and acceptance. As a bartender for the past four years in North Miami dive bars, I eventually learned an important lesson: judging others is being close-minded; it only hinders your own soul. It is important to know the entire story before an assessment can be made. For awhile, at work, I would get frustrated with my older patrons and write them off as drug addicts and drunks who refuse to better themselves. I guess I thought I was above them because I had succeeded in that aspect of life. Today, I know in my heart that it’s possible to acquire some sort of wisdom from each and every person on the planet. Even if that wisdom only teaches you what you don’t want to become, it is still beneficial.
I now take every day as an opportunity to learn something from somebody. And I plan on continuing to do so once I become a school psychologist. It would be impossible to be helpful to students, or to myself, without an open-mind, compassion, and empathy. And in our extraordinarily diverse country, we can all create transformations for ourselves through embracing differences in others.