A Fearlessly Determined and Observant Girl Named Mary

BEING THE YOUNGEST has shaped me in many ways.  I come from a family of six kids.  After watching and looking up to my older siblings my whole entire life, I realized I have become a great observer.  I notice things and take things in.  I usually don't take on leadership roles, but I usually take on the follower role.  I watch others and how they accomplish tasks and then I accomplish the task on my own through my observations.

QUADING was a big activity that my family did growing up.  This activity shaped me in two ways.

1) Family support and love was established there.

I learned that bonding and spending time together brought me closer to my family.  I recognized the importance of family in my life and how I always had a support system there.  I developed more confidence in myself because of a strong family connection.

2)  Facing my fears.

One place that we visited frequently as a family with our quads was the sand dunes.  As an eleven year old girl, I felt fearless and invincible, or at least I thought I was.  I would follow my dad and brothers through rocky slops and up steep mountains.  One evening I had an experience where my back wheels started sliding down the large sand mountain I was driving up, causing me to fall off the motor bike.  My ATV continued with the momentum of it's sliding back wheels and rolled on top of me before it continued rolling down the rest of the mountain.  To me this experience was very frightening.  It could have been a near death experience I had thought.  I had to learn how to face my fears though.  I soon was back on my ATV riding up a storm.  This experience taught me to face my fears and not to give up.      

 

MODERN DANCE has influenced me in two ways.

1)  Becoming more determined and persevering

Coming from no dance background at all, I determined my freshman year that I wanted to become a dancer.  When I took my first modern dance class I was hooked.  I knew I needed to work hard in order to reach the level of many of the dancers that I was dancing with in my classes.  Through trail and error, I learned and grew in my technical and creative abilities.  I soon was admitted into the major after an audition and I still continue going through a trail and error process.  Because of modern dance though, I learned how to continue trying  even when I failed.

2) Developing Creative Problem Solving Skills

Modern dance is also known as creative dance.  The reason for this is because dancers are encouraged to engage in the creative process of exploring and developing new ways of movement.  Often students are given creative prompts to inspire movement.  In other words, they are given a movement problem and they are expected to solve that problem by creating abstract movement.  I use these creative problem solving skills everyday of my life.  Because of modern dance, I have become more creative in my approach to life.     

MY MISSION taught me many things.  Here is a list of the ways in which my mission shaped me...

1) It taught me the principle of sacrifice.

By giving up a year and a half of my life to serve a mission, I learned how to sacrifice things for something of greater worth.  This was a difficult thing to do, but now I understand that principle better.  I understand that if I give something up, even when I don't want to, I will receive something of greater value later on.
  
2) I have more charity because of my mission.

I learned how to give selfless love and service to other people on my mission.  I try to think less of myself now, and more about others.

3) I learned how to have fun and laugh amid the hard times.

Continual door slams in your face and rejections can be hard and very depressing.  After a while of feeling depressed, I learned to find fun and laughter even when things got hard.  I try to be positive even when things aren't going the way I had hoped for.