A great friend of mine once told me “Sometimes you’re just going to need to have thick skin about some stuff man, you can’t let everything hurt you”. Hearing this, I immediately saw that my friend, Jeffrey Gardner [a UCF Knight], was telling me exactly what I needed to hear, and not what I wanted. And from that car ride down to Deerfield Beach, full of the great smell of sea air at night and the sounds of ‘Death Cab for Cutie’, I began to understand what the word resilience meant.
I mean, I have always been what I consider to be a strong person; I never have a problem contributing in class, trying new things, or saying what I mean. But as I entered my junior year, I was hit in the face with stress from ever direction and I was slowly letting it bog me down and I truly wasn’t allowing myself to shine. And I remember talking to Jeff a few days before and he told me he was coming down from Orlando for the weekend and if I wanted to hang out, to give him a call. So I did, and he picked me up, we got some Wendy’s, hopped on the highway and went to the beach. In the car, I just started exploding with all of the fears and aches that had been piercing my heart, especially what was going on at home with my parents and some of the downright negativity people were practicing at my school towards others. And on hearing his advice, it was a consolation of sorts because he told me that he had gone through many of the same things and I couldn’t just let it bring me down because I would be giving all I was away.
And that is what I know I can contribute to the community of UCF, resiliency. The resiliency that allowed me to leave my frustrations with the destructive relationship that was shattering my mom at home, to regrasp my love for theatre and photography no longer caring about the opinions of others as I pursued Romanticism, to be there for friends I thought I’d never make as they weathered the storm of ridiculous high school pressures and putdowns along with troubled homes just like mine and to have the strength to have true inner peace during one of my most favorite years of living until now. Perhaps my greatest reminder of this, is on my journal that I received for Christmas of 2007, on top of it there is a Polaroid picture of a cloud and some trees, and all around the picture are some scribbled quotes and thoughts, second to the top lies one particular quote that’s from a song I love called Love Isn’t Made that says, “Don’t let the panic bring you down”, and looking back at it now the panic and all of the garbage it brought along with it, didn’t bog me down too much , it didn’t kill me so I plan on bringing resilience and peace along with me to the University of Central Florida as a Knight so that there I can pass that along to someone else as Jeff did to me.
