How simple kindness goes a long way by Kyla

How simple kindness goes a long way by Kyla - July 2017 Scholarship Essay

My topic would be about kindness and how being kind to just one person can impact someone's life entirely. I am growing up in a smallish town where a lot of people know each other. Over the years at school, you feel like you have a pretty good understanding of a lot of people. It is very easy to stereotype people and it is done a lot. But behind a “weird girl” or a “rude guy” is someone who struggles. The girl you call weird uses the way she dresses to express herself because at home she feels so unsafe. The boy you think is rude has an abusive father and his rudeness is just a coping mechanism. With shows like 13 Reasons Why growing in popularity, people think they understand what suicide is, but they don’t. Only a few months after 13 Reasons Why came out a boy at my school committed suicide after being bullied because he was deaf. This was second suicide in the past two years. Did a show like actually change people's actions? Or was it a show some of us just binged watched and said: “It changed our life”. Throughout my junior year a made a point to talk to people I don’t usually talk to, people that have been stereotyped by my classmates. And by just simply talking to them I was able to develop friendships that otherwise would have never of occurred.

Sometimes life hands you situations where you can just lose it like when your Starbucks’ barista gets your drink wrong for the third time, but your hateful words could be the ignition to someone committing suicide. Your smile and kind words could defuse the situation. In a world filled with so much hate and killing you have the choice to reverse this with kindness. Being rude may get you a job or trophy, but when you’re old and the paycheck doesn’t seem to matter and your trophies are just stored away in the attic, what’s going to matter more? How much greater would our society be if instead of going at each other to make ourselves look better, we helped each other become our best selves? To close my speech I would say that being the kinder and better person is not always easy, but if you knew that your actions could impact someone's choice to either live or die, wouldn’t you choose to be kind?