Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

The Past: A Present toward The Future

Behind every face, there is a story left untold and unheard.

Who am I? The best way to paint a picture of my identity is to tell you a story about my yesteryears. The past holds a person’s growth, change, and sense of self. My past, in particular, makes up who I am today. I can strongly say that the past has influenced my sense of character, personality, and way of thinking. It is a crucial portion of my life so it is not to be abandoned. My past is neither a happy one nor a sad one but it is the only past that I have known.

It was roughly about six months ago when I started to pack away the last eighteen years of my life in brown boxes. I could remember rays of sunlight peeping through the blinds of my bedroom windows. It was a hot summer day and the buzz from the air conditioner rattled through my thoughts. All I could think at the time was in about less than a week I’ll be starting a new chapter in my life. I’ll be going to college and leaving home for the first time.

The thought of leaving home and living by yourself is unsettling and unnerving especially when you have lived a mostly sheltered life under the guidance of strict parents. My restricted childhood contributed to my personal naivety. All my life I have been told what to do and how to do it. My parents didn’t let me go out much because they feared that I would become one of the ‘bad’ kids. I wasn’t allowed to sleep over friends’ houses and I also wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend, much less guy friends. They always advised me that I needed to excel in school because now was the time to do it. “There is no need to hang out with friends”, they said. “You have the rest of your later adult life to ‘have fun’. Stop arguing with us, you live under our roof and we know what’s best for you”. Well, now that I was finally getting away from their parameters, I thought that I could finally do what I want. I sat there in my bedroom reveling over this newfound sense of freedom.

I didn’t have the perfect family growing up. During my awkward stage of becoming a teenager, my parents were always constantly fighting. I would come home from a long day of school only to hear my mom screaming at my dad and vice versa. I remember how it felt to lie on my bed listening to the verbal battles that took place in the living room. It was life draining, exhaustive, and occasionally repetitive. I felt helpless at first but after a while, I grew accustomed and numbed to the fighting. The arguments had gotten so bad that my dad had actually walked out on the family more times than I can remember. Every time that he had left, my mom would come into my room crying about her hardships as a mother and a wife. How does a child cope with their mother’s breakdown? I didn’t know what to do or say to comfort her so I just sat there every time and absorbed it all in. Every time that my dad had left, I felt my responsibilities of being the oldest in the family emerge as its own entity. There was a persistent need to be strong for my mom and to keep the family together for the sake of my two younger siblings. All of this was very overwhelming for me. That was my life at home at the age of thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. Throughout those times, I developed a sense of personal strength and dependence. I understood that I had to be the one who made life better for myself.

As I was putting my belongings into boxes, I came across a frame with a collage of pictures inside it. One of my good friends had given it to me as a birthday gift. Each picture within the collage represented a random memory of my friends and me. I realized that though I did have strict parents, I had somehow found a way to create my own taste of freedom. I yearned to venture off on my own for brief moments at a time just so I could experience life through my own terms as well as make and learn from my own mistakes. There were many times when my friends and I had ditched school just to run away from the school day’s agenda. I remember instances in the ninth grade where I would only show up for one day out of a week’s worth of school. I knew it was the wrong thing to do but I guess it was a sort of a compromise over the fact that I almost never had a chance to hang out with my friends. As if ditching school wasn’t bad enough, I would often lie to my parents and tell them that I had to stay after school to get extra help when really I went to the movies with my friends in the city. When that excuse got old, I told them that I had taken up a job in the summer just so I could get away from the house and go to the beach. Each picture within the collage held a different story behind it. It was proof that I did play the role of the ‘rebellious’ first child in the family. However, the lies and the deception were my means of escape from the life I led at home.

Throughout high school, I had a persona of being the small quiet Asian girl. Most people, both classmates and teachers, wouldn’t even fathom that I would actually skip school. However, my friends knew me better than that. I could be loud, friendly and blunt as well as nice, personable and considerate whenever I wanted to be. Though I was known for being shy and reserved in school, I was never considered to be an outcast. I had found my own niche and my own group of people that I could call my friends. Amicable and well-liked, I got along with a lot of people and never got in anyone’s way, or at least I hope I didn’t.

As I sat there that day in my bedroom packing up my belongings and reminiscing about old times, I understood that I was going to be leaving the safety net of familiar faces behind. I didn’t want to completely ignore and leave the past behind me. Ultimately, forgetting about my past was impossible for the past was a part of me. I knew that we as people were all eventually going to have to grow up some time, but I didn’t want to do it alone. My biggest fear that day was the uncertainty of what the future had to hold; the fear of not knowing what will become of me. I was scared. I wondered, “If the road ahead of me will be a shortcoming, will I be ready for it?” The very thought of not knowing can be crippling to a person because anything or everything can be spiraled into any which way.

Nevertheless, I had put my fears aside. I understood that it was time for me to let go of the scenery that I had grown to love and hate. I knew that it was necessary for me break free from the mold and embrace this new chapter that I had in front of me. It was time to put the past aside in boxes and be prepared for this new beginning of mine.