The Homeless Student by Bryan

The Homeless Student by Bryan - May 2022 Scholarship Essay

Some people consider being homeless the most difficult thing while you're in it. However, in my experience that was never the case. I survived being homeless, but mainly I survived the mental toll I took on while being homeless. The biggest skill that allowed me to overcome this time was, discipline.
To be clear I will have to take you back to the late November of 2014, when once again my family was being evicted, and yes we had been homeless before. However this was different and we knew it. We had exhausted all resources in our previous times, so now we were on the street during the great cold Fall season and all four of us living in a 1997 Mazda. We had left most things behind and stayed with mostly essentials. We knew it was going to last a while because my fathers mental health was extremely bad, and thats why it lasted 2 years. Without him getting a job, without allowing my mother to get a job, we were hungry and very dirty kids going to school everyday. We would wash our arm pits at a local parks restroom so we didn't smell so bad.
At some point my father stopped letting us go to school claiming it was a waste of time. I had no phone, no internet and no way communicate with classmates for the homework. At some point I had a teacher who told me that I wouldn't graduate so why bother showing up every so often. It started getting to me if I'm going honest.
I had played sports my whole life at high stakes, I also understood that everything that rises must fall and vice versa. So I made sure to do the best that I could, which on top of that I was working nearly full time at a restaurant to try and save up for an apartment. However it all seemed like I was destined to fail that every other week we found something wrong with the car and it needed to be fixed because that was our everything.
Time went by, we finally got some place to be but now I found myself with a new problem, I wanted to go to college but scholarships were only given with those with 3.0 GPA's and above and I have a 2.4, enough to graduate but not enough for anything else. So from junior year until graduation I would get to school 6:30am and leave nearly until 4pm, I would work through my lunches as well because I did not have a computer so I had to sacrifice for two years and in the end I got it. When I looked at my GPA I had ended with a 3.4 putting me just enough for some aid. I am now a senior in college, I will graduate in the fall.