Justin Geary
9/18/14
Senior Seminar

Who Am I?

Throughout any person’s life they try to search for who they are. It is such a bland topic because of the fact that people think they know who they are but they really don’t. This is mostly aiming toward high school students who are juniors and seniors. I face this frustration daily when I try to figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. As I did more research and more thinking it became easier to see who I actually am as a person. What really shapes you as a person come in many different factors, such as your family, the people you hang around, the different activities you participate in, how you live your day to day life; do you live by working hard or do you live everyday by going through the motions? These factors are things I thought long and hard about and became clearer as I grew up.

My family is everything I could possibly ask for, they love support and care about me and what kind of future I have. Ever since I was in first grade my parents were hard on me because they knew how important education was in order for a bright and successful future to happen. I had such I hard life as a kid and even growing up in high school, when I was a baby I went through many surgeries in order to make sure I could breathe correctly. I was born with a disorder that I had holes in my neck which didn’t let me breathe correctly. As I grew older into middle school I used to do little league Mixed Marshal Arts which is a fighting sport. During a fight I was punched in the chest directly where my heart is located and caused a valve to narrow and knocked me unconscious. Ever since then I was not able to participate in any sort of contact sport. This probably was one of the hardest times in my life that my parents and I had to deal with, but this never decreased the amount of love and support they gave me. This is what I can call a supportive family and people I will love for the rest of my life because I know that there are some parents out there that don’t care about their kids and won’t do anything for them.

My activities I believe is what really defines me as a person. My entire life I have been a proud runner and I don’t regret ever starting. Through the hard years of a serious injury I mentioned before running was always a stress reliever for me. Even though I didn’t start running competitively until I was in Eighth Grade it was an important aspect of my life. As I became more familiar into running I started considering to run for a team. My Eighth grade year running for my school wasn’t very good because I wasn’t used to it, but as I moved into high school the miles increased as well as the competitive feeling when racing. My coaches were another inspiration to continue to run because in high school the work outs that we go through are the hardest and the most painful feelings I will ever experience in my life. They are there to motivate my team and I every day to become the best we can be. Through the toughest of times they are there and only want the best of us. To put this all in perspective, running shows the motivation in me and how much I am willing to give up and how much pain I can deal with to become the best I can be. I honestly think that if everyone in the world did some sort of running they will become in better shape, but most important I think it will take them farther in life, because maybe they pushed themselves through a tough work out or a hard race that they thought they could have never finished. I