Throughout the 16 beautiful years of my life, I have gone through many types of
experiences and picked up certain skills here and there. However, an expertise that I have is
playing basketball. I picked up a basketball for the first time at the age of 12 during my first
year of high school and despite my lack of athleticism and absolute zero gifted talent in the
sports category, I had completely fallen in love with the game. Every day since that day, I
was always practicing the game at my local basketball court in the park and through there I
got to meet more people having the same interest as me which got me to playing the sport
even more. These people would then become good friends of mine and we would all play
both fun and serious matches all the time. Now, I can confidently say that I have gotten much
better at the game than just your ordinary player. After getting second place at a basketball
shooting competition in my school, I then got to know many great players in my school and
played with them after school too. Despite the recent pandemic which stopped me from
playing the sport like how I used to, I still love the game and am always ready to challenge
anyone anytime.
My inspiration comes from the idea of personal growth and always looking for ways
to improve myself as a person such as setting goals and new experiences. To me, personal
growth brings a large purpose to my life. Furthermore, I am always motivated by the idea of
helping others by pursuing a career that can hopefully bring a helping hand to the people
around me and companies. The thought of making a positive impact on others is able to get
the gears in my body going. On the other hand, something that would always anger me is
how this today’s society is taught and structured. For most of us, since we were young, we
were all being forced to study and constantly go through stress all the way to adulthood. After
that, we would have no choice but to work a stressful, excruciating, and painful nine-to-five
job just to retire at around the age of sixty leaving us unhappy and a deteriorated mental
health. As for what I love to do, I love playing a variety of computer games and playing
basketball with my friends. These activities make me forget about negative emotions such as
stress and keep me accompanied during my boring free time.
A story in the news that has affected me recently was an old news from back in 2014
which is the Sinking of MV Sewol that happened in Korea. This disaster is about a horrifying
incident where more than 300 students and teachers died during a trip to another island
during the sinking of the ferry which was caused by a very sharp turn of the ferry. At first,
this seemed like just a tragic accident that claimed the lives of many innocent students and
teachers, but it wasn’t. When the ferry was tilting over into the sea, the captain had
apparently told most of the passengers which were just students and teachers who had no
expertise in what was happening to calm down and stay still. While the passengers had
listened to their instructions and did nothing but sit there in the ferry, the captain and some of
the crew members had escaped on their own first. This would then ultimately lead to a very
avoidable death of most of those passengers who simply listened to instructions from the
authorities. This changed my perspective on us human beings and how cruel people can
really be to just leave a bunch of innocent people in a sinking ship and run off on your own. It
also reminded me to always live life to the fullest as anything can happen anytime anywhere
which could end it all.
A problem that has stuck with me for quite a long time is my poor relationship with
my brother. My brother has always been on my side throughout my childhood, and we were
always happily playing with each other. However, nothing ever lasts forever, and those happy
feelings mostly ended when I entered the weird phase of my teenage years and when my
brother entered college. We just stopped having long conversations with each other and
would always fight and have aggressive arguments against each other. Every time we faced
each other, it would always feel as if something was pulling both of us away from each other
and filling our thoughts with negativity about each other. Our relationship had completely
turned from a happy to a toxic one. Now that he is currently in America studying, I have
figured out a few solutions to solve this problem when he comes back such as traveling with
him to another country and hopefully blocking most of our negative thoughts away. I could
even have a long talk with him and try to reconcile our relationship by confronting him with
the problem straightforward.
News article references
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https://safety4sea.com/cm-sewol-sinking-south-koreas-ferry-disaster/
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-sinking-of-the-mv-sewoland-the-confusion-of-disasters