Audio

I believe that we all have the ability to change the way that we live, until we don’t. If I
said that I wanted to change my appearance, I could go to the gym, straighten my hair, or buy a
whole new wardrobe, but if I said that I wanted to live a stress-free life, that’s where things
would get complicated. There is a list of different things that I could do to become less stressed,
but it wouldn’t put me on the path of life that I had intended to go down. Being a student stresses
me out; with all the homework, classwork, and projects, I feel myself being weighed down more
and more every single day. I could drop the classes that are making me anxious, but I would just
have to fill those gaps with something else that would take up my time. I could drop out of
college entirely, but I wouldn’t be able to reach the goals that I had set for myself in the future. If
I wanted to live a less stressed personal life, I could remove all of the people that make me feel
less than my worth. I’ve done it before with friends, and the feeling was amazing, but I can’t do
the same thing with family. Inconsiderate fathers, overdramatic brothers, and unavailable cousins
are unreliable factors of life, but is it an option to remove them from my life? Apparently not
because family is everything, right? If I wanted to remove all of the constant thoughts from my
mind and be able to fall asleep at night, I could take a simple pill, but that would just postpone
the eruption of corrupt voices and memories that plague my mind every day. If I said that I
wanted to change the way that people saw me, we enter many different conversations. Changing
my attitude and personal demeanor would be a factor, but would I like who I had become?
Would I still be being true to myself to satisfy others? Would I be happy not being myself? And
then there’s something that I can’t change: prejudice and racism. Those two things have been
around for basically forever, and how am I, a young black female, supposed to change the
thoughts and views that someone has about me that has been built for generations. Although in

recent years the structure has become less secure, the foundation hasn’t cracked. Believe me, the
want for change is there, but societal constructions have been carefully laid brick by brick and
it’s gonna take more than a small sledgehammer of a person to knock it down. For some people,
a goal for change might be a straight path, and for others, it might be a maze with no real exit
point. For me, I still haven’t figured out everything that I want out of life, so how am I going to
reach my endpoint? I could say do nothing, but that’s too cynical. I could say that I have the
opportunity to live any kind of life that I want, but that’s too optimistic. What I will say is yeah, I
believe that we all have the ability to change the way that we live until we don’t, but whenever
we reach a dead end, we just need to take a different path and see where that leads, and who
knows, it may provide a better destination than where we were heading in the first place.