My Hope and Courage

Hope and courage two words that impact my life everyday. Hope is simply a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. And courage on the other hand is the ability to do something that you know is right or good, even though it is dangerous, frightening or very difficult. For me courage and hope were needed many times through out my life. My first thought is courage is used in everyday life by staying consistent with everyday goals and values. It’s hard to not do the "right" thing in life and so often we wish to take the easy way out, even if no one sees. So courage is being true to you and then the rest of the world will look at that as courageous.

            Courage is part of your true-self. we were born with it. Examples of courage for me is the moment we get out of bed in the morning especially the winter in Canada. It takes courage to make friends or be dedicated, honest worker or student. And it also takes courage to face life issues and accept responsibility in our lives. And when we get older it takes that courage to be an good examples to our children and make them realize what kind of world we live in and that it is forever changing. I always keep three statements to myself that take courage and the first one is apologize. It takes courage to admit when you are wrong and you did something bad. The second one is be yourself. Don’t imitate anyone let the world see your true identity and who you are. And the third one is to take responsibility. It’s us who make the choices in our lives not others, so if you don’t like what you see then change it by making good choices and that will give you the appropriate consequences.

            Hope on the other hand was my second friend who impacted my life. For me hope usually arrives when things are very difficult. And in those difficult moments we able to discover the possibilities still present, and that’s when hope appears. Having a positive sense of hope in our lives is important. Without hope you can’t advance you career to the next levels. Also you can’t full fill relationships with others without it. And most of all you can’t discover the purpose of our lives that god gave us. I’m going to talk about a example of me realizing the significance of courage and hope. When I was in grade 10 everyone was talking about the same thing and that was “work”.  Apparently everybody had jobs and they were just talking about it in front of people who didn’t have any, and I was one of them. The time flew really fast and I was getting annoyed  by people telling me “get a job”.   I told myself i was going to get one, but i was too lazy to get one. However, it was time for me to step up my game and get on with my life as well as my career, so I made resumes which you need to get a job and went outside in the winter by myself in a blizzard and gave resumes to all the stores that were near my house. You see you are probably thinking what does this have to do anything with hope or courage, but it took courage for me to step up and get my life going and hoping that I would get a job. It takes a real man to face the difficult situations no matter what in you life but you still have to keep fighting those and take the right pathways.

            Courage and hope were big part of my life.  They were there for me when I needed  them and were right beside me in every moment in my life. Again courage doesn’t mean you don’t get afraid, courage means you don’t let fear stop you. You have to have courage as well as hope when we get out bed and continue the rest of the day. Courage doesn’t always roar, sometimes its that little voice in your mind that says at the end of the day “i’ll  try again tommorrow”.

-By Samila Walgama 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-6Uk6cvcaI

End of Free Trial

When I was younger I was protected from the worries and the evil of today, not just the injustices and crimes of the outside world though. I was sheltered from event occurring in my own house, in my own family. I learned to never get too comfortable with living somewhere because I never knew when we would have to move again. The first time we moved was the worst because now that I’m older and look back I realise, that’s where it all started to go downhill, and that was the end of my free trial. We moved to this strange trailer park just on the outskirts of town, I had no idea why we had moved nor what was going on. I was sheltered from situations and lied to about emotion, I never understood why I would see my father cry or why I would wake up to fists flying through my door. I didn’t understand why my mom would leave crying in her car, while my dad stayed home and told my sister and me that everything would be ok. My sister was my protector she kept me from the harms of this twisted world but she could only do so much.   The next few years were a struggle for my family, but the moment I will never forget is the moment where my protector – my sister – was torn from me.   I remember my mother pulling me away from the house where my sister hid and I remember crying to my father to help me, to unite me with my sister, but he did nothing but stand there idly. He could not even look me in the eye because he knew his lack of action, was an injustice to his son.  I lost her in that moment.  After all of that had happened we were living in Lethbridge; I was without my sister, without my shelter. I had become very depressed and often contemplated suicide, and then I had received news that my sister would be coming back. I was more than excited, but when she came home she was a different person. And then I got the news that when she was gone she had been violated in the worst.    I felt broken, destroyed even knowing that I was not able to protect my sister after all she had done for me. She was often suicidal and so was I, and the introduction of a step dad living with us did not make anything better, since he was a trigger to my parent’s separation. I started to notice that whenever she would fight with our step father I had become her protector and tried to shield her from his ignorance to our situation. After many years and many different houses, I found myself at CCH.  Grade 11 is when  I relapsed the hardest I had found out that my younger sister Shae committed suicide because she just couldn’t do it anymore, and every time I try to talk to someone about I feel like I should have been there to protect her from all of this. Not too long after I found out my dad had been trying to kill himself ever since he was the one who found her. This crushed me knowing that he would leave me, my sister, and my 7 year old brother behind with no father. This was when I started getting into a lot of different drugs and noticed myself drinking quite often. I was on my way downhill but then I started to see what I was doing to myself and needed to change and make my goal to graduate. The first time I ever heard my father tell me he was truly proud of me was when I got to see him after the convocation at grad.  Many times in my life I had given up hope, I thought it was over; I wanted it to be over, but as time goes on I can start to see a better life away from all of this, a new found hope. It took a lot of courage for me to be able want to get out of bed, even to live, to come to school, and to prosper and make it through. Now you might understand those days when I came to class late or didn’t come at all.

Rest in peace.

Shae-Lynn

Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and GMCs

August 6^th 2014 may have been the most difficult day of my life. Let me start it off from the beginning. We decided to go bridge jumping, which we didn’t have permission to do. We got there and it was gorgeous. We pulled up close enough to the end of the bridge so we could jump off the bridge, great idea right? Wrong. We had just got our things out of the truck, our tubes, towels and Slurpee’s. We slammed the door of the truck just as we realized that we had locked our keys, and all of our phones in the truck. Perfect. Just another thing to ruin our day.  Thankfully, another group of people were there, so we used their phones to get hold of all our parents to let them know our situation.  We needed to have courage to call our parents and let them know even though we weren’t allowed to be there. My dad had another set of keys for the truck, but they were with him and he was at work 12 hours away in Fort McMurray. Just my luck! “Wait a minute, let me call my parents, they have AMA!” my friend Carly said. So we called AMA, and waited 6 long hours just sitting on the side of the bridge when they finally arrived. My friends and I were exhausted. We were super excited to be going home after a long day. We got in the truck and we followed my boyfriend out onto the rough gravel road. We had the music turned up loud, having a great time when I hit a huge hole in the road. I realized I was losing control of my vehicle. I told the girls in my truck I had no control and to hold on. We started fishtailing back and forth between the left and right side of the road.   We veered off to the right side of the road and the ditches were super steep. My bull guard caught on the ground in weeds and grass flipped my truck. I remember watching the glass smash in towards us and my 7 hour old melted Slurpee fly upside down and spill everywhere. It’s like everything was in slow motion. I watched as my world was crumbling before my eyes. We came to a stop finally after flipping a time and a half. Thank the lord we landed on all fours. I looked around at all the windows smashed in and at all the blood on my legs. I asked if everyone was alright and when I heard both of them say they were fine I got out of the vehicle. To this day I don’t know how I got out; the doors were smashed in so bad they couldn’t be opened. My boyfriend came running. I remember blood everywhere as I screamed the worst words as loud as I could. How could this happen, I thought It was honestly the scariest experience of my life. My dad was there so soon along with everyone else's parents. We needed to have courage in this experience because even through all of this happening we needed to keep level headed and be brave. It was an extreme experience, but it taught us how to handle extreme experiences. They took us to the hospital immediately to make sure we didn't have whiplash or bad concussions. One of the girls in the truck didn't have her seat belt on so she had a dislocated shoulder. The other girl had the roof came in on her head which gave her a concussion. I walked away with tons of cuts and bruises but nothing else, thank God. I will never forget this experience. I think I showed courage by going through the situation and remaining as calm as I possibly could and not breaking down. I think I showed hope by hoping after the situation happened that everything would get better and go back to normal eventually. Now this is nothing but a memory but I will never forget this experience. I've never been so courageous in my life.

-By Shelby Bootsma

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKXfqpg-Q-k

Not Caring About Not Caring

When it comes to my life, while it might be there, I don’t consciously think about courage and hope. When it comes to them, I really am a 50-50, on the fence type of mind set. It’s so much in the middle; I don’t really know how to explain it very well. In some cases I am all the way “I don’t want people to think bad things about me, or think I’m weird.” But at the same time, I could turn around in another setting, and truly think the exact opposite. It really is just a random mix of the two. And it’s not that I will care about what people think for one thing, and not care for another. It switches between caring and not caring what people think no matter what scenario it’s in. Believe it or not, I myself am not too sure about it, let alone know what to think about it. What I find to be even more confusing about the whole thing is when I hang out with good friends. When I’m with some of my closest friends, almost all social moral goes out the window. Of course I still act “refined” but I truly stop caring what other people will think of me in all ways. I can’t really explain it, but I just push past every fear of what other people think. I’d like to say the friends “give me the courage to be myself”, but I know that’s not that case, because when I’m not with friends, (most of the time) I really do care what others think. Both cases are true and it’s not a case of one is “hiding” the other. I really can’t think of how to explain it. I guess it’s just some “weird” mind set of both courage and fear mixed together. Of course other than when it comes to trying to explain it, I myself really don’t find anything wrong with thinking this way. Though I somewhat would like to change some of the cases where I do care what others think. Some of the things are just little trivial things I shouldn’t care about, but I just can’t push past.

-By Garrett Van Lent

Diamond In the Rocks

There was a time in my life when I was alone. My parents were recently divorced and I had a boyfriend who didn’t care about me. He liked me because I was pretty, thin and vulnerable. I had a very low self-esteem and he took advantage of me, in so many different ways. At first he treated me amazing, he made me feel pretty and smart, and I felt like I was on the top of the world. I felt good. The depression that had once consumed me left and I thought I was better. The feeling lasted for a little less than a month and then it all came back. Slowly, the darkness took over again. I wanted to be alone all the time, it made me feel safe. When I closed myself off he became very aggressive. He didn’t understand what I was going through. He became verbally and mentally abusive. I blamed myself for a very long time. I know now, that it was the depression talking. I let it slide for a long time; I pretended everything was okay. When I did have the support from my friends, and I tried to break it off, he told me he would kill himself.  I couldn’t be responsible for someone’s death. I still cared about his well being and that slowly became my biggest worry. I owed him for helping me. I didn’t realize that what we had was unhealthy. I had fallen so deep into my depression that I gave up everything; my art, my friends, and my relationship were holding on by a thread. I had lost myself.

In July 2012, I tried to end my life. I honestly thought I had no other choice. Life was so overwhelming. I spent two weeks in the pediatric ward at the Lethbridge Hospital, and I was on suicide watch for most of it -Two full week without any communication from the outside world, it was rough. I did learn a lot about myself though. I found out that I deserved better. I let people walk all over me, because I longed to be accepted. I found out that I am diamond and I wouldn’t, couldn’t settle for anyone who treated me like I was anything less. Because of my experiences, I’ve found someone who helped me through my depression, and will stand next to me tall and proud. I found the courage in myself to keep moving forward.

-By Abigail Schaaf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3LH-fMNOAA

The Monster Within Myself

Throughout my life, growing up I had to overcome many challenges and obstacles. My parents divorced when I was six years old and ever since then I had to face several challenges. I got bullied, I lost family members, I moved with my aunt and lived without my parents or siblings around. I developed many insecurities and lost all hope and courage in my life. For a period of time I was in a constant battle with myself; the monsters within me took over and always told me I wasn’t good enough. There was mornings I would wake up and wish that I hadn't, I would isolate myself and not want to be around people. I always wanted to be alone, but at the same time I hated being alone. I always wondered why these monsters always attacked me until I found out that depression was the answer. Depression had made me lose all hope that things would get better, that everything would be okay. I had no courage to get up in the mornings and face humanity, but I had to. I was my worst enemy and time and time again those monsters would try and enter my life. My family and friends helped me get rid of these horrible attacks and helped me overcome this dark stage in my life. I can admit that I am still my worst critic, but I am able to still feel pride in myself. It took a while to feel normal, but without the help and support from my family, I would probably still have these monsters attacking me. 

-By Keelie Twigg 

Being Vulnerable

What vulnerability in your life do you embrace? The vulnerability that I embrace is that I’ve come to the realization that I am by no means perfect. I have accepted that never in my life will I ever be the “perfect” human that some believe the human race is able to achieve.  I, on the other hand, think quite differently than this. I recall experiences in my life where there were lots of people trying to tell how to behave and telling me that I must act like everyone else. I was very young at the time, so what did I know?  Nothing.  I knew nothing and it was because I started at nothing that I drifted away from the rest as each person does in life. Just think for a second what it would be like if everyone you locked eyes with was identical to you. What I believe is that making mistakes brings uniqueness to us all, but how can we make mistakes if we are perfect?   And if we are perfect then there wouldn’t be many things in this world that we would truly enjoy. Think for a second what being perfect means, it means being efficient and in order to be efficient we must get rid of the things that are slowing us down. For me that means that one of the first things to disappear would be human emotion. I mean what need is there for human emotion right?  Well, as it turns out it gives a person’s life a factor that others may or may not share. What I mean by this is that without this factor we are just drones looking for the perfect way of life. As a kid I was rather violent, but that was because I didn’t know any emotions that brought joy, I was only able to hurt and to be hurt. So what happened is that I was put on medication for the behavior, and one day I took double the amount that I was supposed to ingest; I became a lifeless drone only able to follow simple orders. I couldn’t think, nor could I feel any kind of emotion good or bad and at times I couldn’t speak because I wasn’t able to form the words needed, I would just nod. To me that is what life will become if we do become perfect, but I believe the human race is unable to become this because we feel. We laugh and sometimes we cry, we get angry at the world cursing our existence  and sometimes we are up and about laughing with joy and blessing  this world we are on. It could happen all in the same day and that is what makes life human. To me humans are a portrait of emotion that can never be replaced or copied. Each piece brings something new and different to the table, so that we can never expect how it came to be. So all in all being vulnerable is what makes us as humans so great.         

-By Tyler Berg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65_D8_pcJKQ

Hope

When the whole world says give up, hope whispers and tell us ‘try it one more time’. That’s what we call hope.  In our lives we need hope otherwise we will not be able to reach our life goals.  Also, hope offers the possibility of survival.  Hope gives us a new life with new hopes and new targets. I believe we should have some hope even if we think it’s not going to happen because I do believe in miracles.

As teenagers we all need hope. When I was small I wanted to be a doctor or a teacher. That’s our beginning. We all have  huge hopes like this to be an engineer, doctor, teacher, a mother, or a father. When I was small I thought that to be a doctor was so easy.  I thought it was just keeping a stethoscope and writing some medicine on a paper, but as I grow up I realize that it's not easy, and it's not all about a stethoscope and a prescription, it's way more than that.  As we grow up we need to change our hopes and we need to be realistic and hope helps us to find our self.  I gave up on the idea of being a doctor, but it gave me a new hope to be a graphic designer. That’s my new hope and I know what I need to do to be a graphic designer; I know the path to go on. Hope always give us determination and courage.

Hope is not all about our life goals; it’s also about our survival. It helps for our day to day activities too. For example, early in the morning I have to wake up in order to go to school. Imagine... it’s a rainy day and I’m too lazy to wake up and my mind says to stay home and sleep more, but hope whispers to me, ‘Wake up! Wake up! You have to stay at class, you are not going to gain anything by sleeping. Wake up!’ Hope always encourages us. That’s why I keep saying that we need to have hope. Not just one hope, we should have thousands of hopes; if plan ``A`` didn’t work we can try the plan`` B``.

-By Saveesha Liyanage 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jQiuZdOvbM

Broken Sticks

It’s hard to choose between the life choices I want and the life choices others want me to choose. Personally I love music.  I’ve been drumming for almost 10 years and I’m starting to wonder where it’s taking me. I think it’s taking me to a career and to become famous and reach out to people with my music. I’ve been told time and time again that it’s a one in a million chance I will become famous and make a successful career out of travelling and it only happens to the few or the lucky. So, I have to keep hope if I want to continue on anywhere. If I want to keep the motivation to keep playing and keep bettering my skills I need to keep hope that I’m going somewhere with my music. I’m not saying I’m going to drop everything else and focus only on music, but I’m not going to let other people’s opinion of what it takes to be successful crush my dream. I feel like it’s always been my place to prove everyone wrong about the things they think I’m doing wrong with my life. I will admit not everything I do is smart or looked upon as acceptable, but the things I can stand up for myself with I will surely do, like tattoos. My parents think me getting tattoos is a terrible idea and I’ll never get a successful job with tattoos, but I feel strongly that it’s the way I want to express myself. The bottom line is it takes a lot of hope and courage to choose between what makes you happy and what others think will make you happy, but no matter what way you choose, your happiness needs to come first. 

-By Kyle Sanford

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auLBLk4ibAk&feature=youtu.be
When I know how to play this song correctly, that is when I will know that I am 
where I am meant to be as a drummer!