Assignment 3: Emma Lauritzen- How to get to another reality in 1 hour and 42 minutes

Throughout my life I have been gifted with the opportunity to travel. I went on my first plane when I was less than 3 months old and I have since gone on planes several times a year. While this travel is amazing, personally none of the trips were life changing. I mean in no way to sound spoiled and ungrateful-I was just sheltered and young. These trips were with family, meaning that they were the same experiences and in different places. But when I was reading the prompt, one change to my environment did come to mind. It was not a vacation or a trip and it was only 1 hour and 42 minutes away.

During my freshman year of high school I had the biggest reality shock I think I will ever have. I will spare the details that led me to this atomic bomb of change; lets just say time passed slowly for months on end and then everything came to a screeching halt. Two days passed, and I was living in the adolescent in-patient division of a psychiatric hospital. Never in my life had I experienced something so foreign.  I was in a completely surreal environment with people I would have never met otherwise. When I said that my fun vacations didn't change me its because they don't compare to how this new living environment changed me. I met people who made me look at life differently, and I learned what its like to rediscover pride in life, but mostly I learned to adapt to the climate around me. You never truly get to discover your own being until you are placed somewhere where you don't have your friends, your school, your hobbies, your possessions, your phone, or any of your earthly possessions to define you. I had to define myself by my actual mind as opposed to my bullet points on a "get to know me" handout. It changed me. 

I can now present myself in an honest manor, and I don't take what people say to heart. In terms of school, my education is not longer a waiting game until real life starts but an opportunity to rediscover who Emma really is. It also gave me a second chance at life. I believe explains the enrichment of my life better than anything else.