What is the most important lesson you've learned from a teacher? by Erika

What is the most important lesson you've learned from a teacher? by Erika - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

The most important lesson I’ve learned from a teacher is one that can’t be taught in a regular curriculum. Ms. Dianne Farbiarz taught me what it meant to truly be happy in life. The lesson is to guide yourself to where no one else could take you.
In life there are millions of decisions a person is expected to make, but as people who want to succeed and satisfy our own curiosity, we often tend to ask for help. I’ll be the first to admit asking for help is tempting when you’re on the journey to self-discovery (emphasis on the ‘self’) and you’re also a curious young adult. We as humans want to feel good about ourselves based on the decisions we make, but what happens if those decisions don’t make us feel good? We’re taught to expect praise or reproach as a result of the decisions we make. In fact, all the decisions have done is make us feel worse… how does one justify that? The simple answer is, we don’t. Ultimately we all need to accept that failure is not only a part of life, but a part of personal growth. Our obstacles and unique experiences (painful or not), make us the person that we decide is good enough not to justify, no questions asked.
Whether it happens over the course of a year, or the entirety of a day, we all have that realization of self-acceptance. For most people, this happens when he or she has a steady job, could be married, and maybe even has kids. At that point in our lives, we’ve made decisions based on what we’ve been told will make us happy. When we’re young, we’re told that a good job and family is what leads us to living a happy life. In other words, living the “American Dream” will only lead you to happiness; and that could be true. But what about the people who decide that the “American Dream” is not what they necessarily want for themselves. Of course, no person wants to struggle financially or be constantly looking for a group of people that they share interests with. That’s not what I’m talking about. Although, what if the traditional route isn’t the one I want to take? Meaning, what if I don’t want to get married and have kids by the age of thirty. That seems more common nowadays, but how does one get there? Certainly not by asking other people for help. As a young adult, all we try to do is make sense of the world with what we’re given and use that knowledge to make a better life for ourselves. There is no universal formula for true happiness; it is unique to each person. How does each person discover their own formula if we’re all given the same equation? This is where personal decisions and self-acceptance comes in.
The world is in fact a hundred shades of gray, but the world is acting as if they all know which shades of black and white make up the gray. In order to be happy, we’re told to get a good job and almost everything will fall into place; I agree with most of that. The truth is, we need to learn how to exactly determine who we want to be through the decisions we make by ourselves, when no when is looking, or talking to us. We’re always told we won’t be able to live a happy life by making the decisions that our elders didn’t make. In a lot of instances, that’s true, and this advice is set in place to keep us safe and prevent us from making the same mistakes our elders did. Each person is different, and sometimes we need to go through the struggle of finding out who we are—at whatever age—to get to that point of true happiness. True happiness being the result of self-acceptance, without justification.
We as people justify our actions because they disagree with some part of our thoughts. The idea is to live a life agreeing with yourself, before you agree with anyone else. In other words, work hard and make decisions that will make yourself happy, because a life like that will be a life without justification. Dianne Farbiarz taught me that a life with ultimate self-acceptance is the one you can’t figure out by asking someone else.