A small child sits and stares into the past. As she stares she sees her most horrifying memories pass her by. This little girl sees the times two different men progressively molested her. She then sees her fathers blood on the carpet, hears her sister scream, and thinks, ‘Wow, he is really dead!’ Her memories skip from her nine year old life to her tenth birthday. She is now a foster child and has learned that her thirteen year old sister tried to kill herself. The little girl hears her name being called and she snaps back to the present. She is now a sixteen year old sitting in her high school class with tears running down her face. She is speechless. This little girl’s name is Lauren and her life was lived by me. Yes, I have had a rough seven years in foster care, but that doesn’t mean I do not have a positive outlook on life.

I have kept a positive outlook on life, but many people I know have not. One such person is my sister, Danielle. My sister has had much harder circumstances to live through than I had to and she believed it would not get any better. My sister never told me her story, but I know something happened. Other wise she wouldn’t have went from being a cute innocent eleven year old girl to an illicit drug smoker, a suicide thinker, and a person who did not believe in abstinence. My sister, now nineteen, has became a much better person and now has a stable life and is not making bad choices, but she still has a negative outlook on life. Although Danielle started off with negative choices and now chooses positive ones, yet she still has a negative out look on life. In a way she has given up. For my sister giving up was an option, but for me it was not. I grew up in that same unloving home, but I decided early on that I would never live that life style. I wanted to be more than the useless, walked on trash that my family was. In this decision I made a choice to not let any goals fall out of my life unless I no longer had interest in them. To do this I couldn’t give up on school, keeping in touch with the family I still had, or making my self a respectable woman. To this day I have not given up, even though most people who had gone through the same things I did gave up a long time ago.
When I wake up every morning I do not only decide not to give up, I also decide to look at the big picture. I am no longer a small child used to make others happy, I am now a young woman who will succeed; I am NOT: a piece of trash or someone else’s property. All of this and more is included in my big picture. Through all the crap in my life I have come out alive and happy. There IS a big picture people just need to wake up and realize it.
A positive outlook is what makes us or brakes us, it is what we use to make the impossible possible. Being negative starts with a single complaint and complaining is a sign that the person is unhappy. Why would someone not be happy? All they have to do is remember that god gave us the gift of a day and the challenges that come with a day are their teachers. Even though one can not control another’s actions, their own reaction is still up to them.
I have been hurt throughout my life, but that doesn’t matter now. I will go on and live my life because I have the present and the future to rely on. I am in a loving adoption home and I still have part of my biological family in my life and in the future I will have this and more to hold on to. I am a dual credit student, have a 3.94 G.P.A., am ranked 90 out of 511, and I am happy. What has kept me going and will always keep me going is my positive outlook on life!