My Greatest Academic Achievement by Melissa

My Greatest Academic Achievement by Melissa - March 2014 Scholarship Essay

As a child, I was considered very bright. For example, in my eighth grade year (with the assistance of a photographic memory), I scored at a post-collegiate level on my MEAs (Maine Educational Assessments). Studying seemed to be the easiest thing in the world for me. I was born for it. There was just something about opening the cover of a book that seemed to pull me in like the gravitational pull between the earth and the moon. Its pages contained places, people, and things that I could become, feel, love, and learn from. Its words were like the beat of my heart, pumping life’s essence through my veins: constant, reliable, and true. On average, I read thirty novels a month, not including the books in my school curriculum. I was every teacher’s dream.

Near the end of my eighth grade year, February 27, 1999, changed everything. My brother and his fiancé died in a horrible car accident four miles from her home. It was her seventeenth birthday and they were on their way to her party. When I began my freshman year at the high school him and I would have attended together, I faced the constant reminder of their loss in every classroom. Being from a small town, the loss of two bright, loving teenagers had a devastating effect on the community, and there were memorials of them everywhere you turned. Too young to understand the will of God and with little to no parental guidance, I began to skip school to avoid the pain of the constant reminder. This led to many bad choices, many learning experiences, and no high school diploma. The once studious pupil with a bright future now had none.

At eighteen years of age, I was held hostage for two and a half months. Saved by a brave Sergeant of the Bangor Police Department and the FBI, I thought I was finally free. Life began to take place. I had a gorgeous Prince in January of 2006 and then my beautiful Princessa in December of 2009. Shortly thereafter, I was diagnosed with severe PTSD having fifty-seven of the fifty-eight symptoms and I lost them both, custody being granted to their grandparents. I had no idea what PTSD even was prior to my diagnosis, and having lost the only reason I had to live, I dove off of the deep end losing all control. I became a drug addict and an adrenaline junky just searching for anything that could make me feel even the slightest bit of false happiness in an attempt to fill the empty shell I had become after the loss of my children.

After three years of extensive SAIOP (Substance Abuse Intensive Outpatient Program), group therapy, psychiatric medication, three appointments a week with a psychologist, and a new found Savior, I was living drug-free, medication free, and had discovered a woman who loved herself for the first time in her life, with strength she never knew she could possess. The woman my children had needed from the very beginning. With the inside changed for the better, I began the process of changing the outside aspects of the life I had so badly damaged. Picking up the pile of trash I had created of my life one piece at a time.

Now, two years later, I am still drug-free, back in the town I grew up in attending adult education in order to receive the credentials I messed up as a teenager. Filled with the determination of hearing my children’s laughter and the pitter patter of little footsteps once again in my home, I have completed all of my pre-HiSet (the new GED standard) tests, taken two of the six finals required for my HiSet certification, in order to start college courses in the spring semester. My goal is to open my own Custom Home business once I receive my degree in Business Administration and Construction Management. I have also been working on the two credits I have remaining for my high school diploma, as I refuse to leave any piece of the life I messed up unfinished, and have completed one-quarter of the Social Studies credit needed, just over one-fifth of the half credit needed for Science, and begun the essay that will bring me the half credit needed for English. All in just two short weeks.

This is my greatest academic achievement. The unrelenting determination to regain the education and life I have denied myself for so long. So that I may show my children that no matter how far you fall, you can still climb higher than you ever dreamed.