Although growing most flowers involves careful tending and preparation, requiring a delicate combination of water, food and sunlight to survive - some flowers amazingly grow in the desert. Desert flowers can thrive and spawn beautiful landscapes even amidst the harshest of environmental conditions. Surviving blistering heat and sun, arid, dehydration and a host of other hardships, these flowers can awe visitors, who after driving through miles of isolation cannot believe their eyes when they arrive upon this amazing anomaly of life and fertility.
Much like these inspiring creatures, my origins could be described by some as dismal, maybe even stifling. Being the daughter of a mother and father who grew up in poverty, I lost my father to H.I.V. and my mother and I overcame various obstacles throughout my life, including living with domestic violence, sexual abuse, unstable housing and other trials that made it difficult to look forward to a positive future. As a child, I was never sure where to turn to for inspiration and I struggled to meet expectations in school. Subsequently, I was diagnosed with a learning disability in reading and writing, and it became increasingly hard for me to believe in myself, without many personal successes to draw from. But even in the arid desert some flowers still survive, and through the encouragement of my grandparents and reading teacher, I pressed on, and by late elementary school I was able to overcome these challenges begin feeling my first life successes through school. I felt a great sense of accomplishment and pride through my achievements in school, and it seemed to be the only variable in my life that I could control. So I thrust my energies into achieving in education and ended up becoming the first on one side of my family to graduate from high school, (graduating early in just three years), and one of the first on both sides to pursue a college education.
Heading to college with a full academic scholarship, I was sure that my worries were over and I was far beyond the reaches of the desert, but I was critically mistaken. Completely unprepared mentally and socially to handle my new environment, I yielded to the pressures of being away from home in a new world at a mere sixteen-years-old. With family dysfunctions erupting, I became distracted by my mother’s struggles to break away from a violent relationship and her financial and other hardships, and my grades took a turn for the worst. Although not failing any classes I definitely did not maintain a 3.0 G.P.A. which was required for my scholarship. This led to a conversation with the Dean of the Honors Program, Dr. Stanley P. Rich. Unbeknownst to me, this fatherly and concerned conversation would last for hours, and we exchanged about everything, personal stories, politics, and views on life that we derived from similar upbringings. We shared with each other a care and concern for others; mine developing primarily as a memory of my late father, and his from his late grandmother, and some of the critical lessons I took away from our conversation was how to help others, and the need to establish myself first before reaching out to help while, I, myself, was still vulnerable. Dr. Rich died later that summer during the break due to stomach cancer, but his words and his memory would echo throughout my life and career in the helping profession as a school counselor, (which I have been working diligently for the past ten years, trying daily to pay-it-forward for the blessings of life and renewal that I was given in my brief interactions with my former Dean and mentor).
As I bring to a close my personal narrative, I reflect upon some of my most outstanding accomplishments: although growing up rarely venturing beyond my neighborhood, with the greatest body of water I experienced being the fill of a bathtub, I have traveled across the world to Hungary, Germany, Spain, Greece, Portugal and the Netherlands to name a view, and beheld the Earth’s greatest oceans and marvelous seas, and although starting in special education, I graduated from undergrad near the top of my class and in the top five of my major, receiving a departmental achievement award for commitment to scholarship and research. I doubt few would ever predict these things to be a part of my future just knowing my beginnings, but as a wildflower grows in the desert, so have I. If afforded the opportunity to pursue a legal education, I will continue a legacy of service to others, and try my best to help undervalued groups to overcome their personal challenges, even with few resources. Hopefully, I will help to cultivate beautiful landscapes of wildflowers like me – growing and thriving from the desert.