The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

Narrative & Memoir 67 things began to change. It became evident that my parents were not as rich as I had once thought. It was not because they weren’t hard workers, or that my father gambled all our money away. It was because my parent’s jobs did not pay well, and because they had given up many work hours to spend time with me and my siblings. They were already supporting my sister in college, so there was little chance I would get any help financially. And since I had little money of my own, it looked like I would not be going to college. “Have you started preparing for the ACT?” my mom asked out of the blue one day. “The what?” I replied. “It’s a test that you need to take to get into colleges” she said. “But I’m not going to college” I said. “If you get a high enough score, you can get a full ride” she replied. “I don’t know, that sounds like a lot of work “I said. “If you want to go to college, you have to get a scholarship.” I decided I might as well give it a shot. Pencils up. It was harder than I thought. Studying for a three-hour test was not first on my list of fun things to do. When my friends were done with school for the day, they would hangout, play video games, or go outside and kick the soccer ball around. When I was done with school for the day, I would sit at my desk and start working on the ACT. I thought it was a waste of my time. So did my friends. “Stop being such a try-hard and come play some soccer” my buddies would say. Every atom in my body wanted to put my pencil down, stand up, throw my ACT Prep books into the nearest trash can, and fallow their advice. But I didn’t. I kept working through my practice tests and exams, through all the math calculations and graphs, until I noticed something about me starting to change. I started to realize how selfish I was for wasting my time and my talents that God had given me. God had given me a good brain, and all I used it for was to beat the next level of some video game. Over the next few months I started to gain a work ethic that I had never had before. I started to love studying. It was fun to learn new facts and ideas, and I looked forward to the challenges that the difficult subjects presented. I still enjoyed soccer and video games and all that stuff, but the joy of learning started to overshadow those things. I stopped caring that my friends thought I was a nerd for working hard.