Rollercoasters by Jennifer

Rollercoasters by Jennifer - October 2018 Scholarship Essay

Life is a rollercoaster. You spend hours anticipating the ride, only for it to last a few seconds. But in those few seconds, you go through anxiety-invoking ups, and stomach dropping downs. These ups and downs are the parts of life that you both wish for and never expect to happen. The events that make life worth remembering, but that also leaves you wishing for a better one every night. Viewing life in this way makes it seem like as if life is nothing but a black and white adventure: only ever ups and downs, no twists, turns, or going reverse. It’s a simple ride that feels like it’ll take forever to get to and forever to get off. Viewing life in this has led to multiple bumps in my life. Especially since life doesn’t simply go up and down, life goes in directions that don’t even have a name yet. This in turn, created complications in my journey, and completely ruined my child-like creativity. That is, until I entered my first high school English class and had to learn a neat little trick called, “thinking outside the box.”
When I first started high school, I was extremely close-minded. I always thought there was only one way of doing things, and that if you ever tried a different way, you were wrong. I never explored the world nor my own mind for a different, and maybe simpler way of doing things. It was so bad in fact, that if you ever told me when I was in 9th grade, that you can capitalize a letter without having to activate caps lock and then inactivate it every time, I would’ve looked at you like as if you were insane. Saddest past about that, is that I would’ve only had that reaction because I never thought about a simpler and more out-of-the box way of capitalizing my letters. I had to go through the first few weeks of my 9th grade year with this bland mindset. Luckily, I was saved by an English assignment that my then English teacher had given to us. She had given us the task of writing an essay. It had seemed simple enough when she first told us about it, until she told us we had to come up with every aspect of it. Now, for any other person, this may not seem like such a nerve-wracking assignment, but to a 14 year old girl who only knew one format of writing an essay and who couldn’t use her imagination for the life of her, it was terrifying.
This was where out-of-the box thinking first came into my life. When I first learned about using this imaginative concept, I couldn’t help but immediately translate it into: “You have to break the rules.” You can’t blame me for that though, I was petrified of breaking any rule, and I really do mean any. I was a small teenage girl who wasn’t even sure if the teacher would be fine with me coughing in class because they would tell us there can be no noise or talking while they’re talking. So thinking outside of the box was nothing short of terrifying. Amazingly though, I managed to rewire my brain to accept this new risky yet fun way of thinking. I’m also extremely glad I did, because if I hadn’t I’d most likely still be sitting in my 9th grade English class, trying to figure out how to write an essay. Thinking outside of the box not only got me to where I am today, it will also get to where I want to be.