When The Bird Leaves The Nest

There comes a time in your life when you have to start making your own decisions. You have to be confident in them, confident that you’re capable of making logical decisions and overall utilizing your own discernment.

Coming from a late night, I boarded my solo flight, took my seat and began to reflect on my capability of making decisions and the recent disagreement I had with my mom.

Last year I was inspired and encouraged by one of my professors to apply for Alternative Breaks (AB). AB is a program provided by LMU where they select a group of students to travel to various counties/countries in hopes of fighting one common goal — social justice. I quickly became interested and applied to become a group leader for the Mental Health trip. My good friend Lila and I applied, had our interviews and waited for the verdict. We knew that there could only be one leader, but we promised each other that we’d still participate no matter who got the position. Fast-forward a couple of months later many things were going on in the world from the continuous Police brutality resulting in the killings of my people, to terrorist attacks in my beloved Paris, Brussels, and beyond (…sadly things are still occurring).

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Post-Surgery: I’m A Soldier (pronounced – SOULjaa)

It has been approximately three months since I had my fourth and very last open-heart surgery. The last time I had surgery was at ten years old, having to undergo yet another surgery I honestly wasn’t scared because it had become routine for me. I even often refer to the hospital/doctor’s office as my second home. The real issue here was that this time was very different from the rest – reason being was that the times in the past I was a child (either in infancy or elementary years). Yet this time around I was an adult – meaning everyone’s calling me and looking to me for answers. Yes, my mother was still by my side every step of the way, but the ball was entirely in my court now. I scheduled my doctors appoints, pre-ops, post-ops, infusions, x-rays – I did it ALL! It was so weird having to do these things on my mom, because I was used to my mom taking care of everything. This meant I had to really become knowledgeable with specific terminology, instructions, and the way everything worked. Surprisingly, I knew WAY more about my condition and my heart than I gave myself credit for *Pats Self on the Back*

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Embracing Change

As a future counselor, I feel as if I get all of my practice on my family and friends. Thursday night, my cousin came to me with a concern about her and her longtime boyfriend of five years. These two are definitely peas in a pod. If you see Mia, there’s Chase and vice versa. Lately, they both have been coming into their own and pretty much have been venturing off and doing things separately. Mia’s worried that they’ll eventually drift apart due to becoming so big on their own, and they won’t need each other anymore.

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