Essay on Significant Life Change

554 Words3 Pages
I’ve heard time and time again the phrase “People don’t change” but that’s simply not true. In fact, everyone changes through the course of their lives. Every experience in your life changes who you are as a person, however, some experiences have a much more profound impact on your life. I myself have had such an experience. As a child I attended a very small private school whose curriculum was entirely based around the Christian religion. I attended this school from kindergarten all the way through the fifth grade. I wasn’t allowed to interact with any children who didn’t share the same belief system I did. For years I never even knew that other religions existed. As a result I became a very sheltered person, never experiencing anything that didn’t have a direct correlation with God. But when I graduated from elementary school to middle school my parents allowed me to attend a public school. This opened up a whole new world to me. My first day in class was horrifying, I knew no one but my best friend from the private school, Arthur, who had transferred to the public school a year before. After about six months attending the school, I had finally gotten a grasp on the whole thing. Coming from the Christian school, I had been programmed by a very strict set of rules to be one type of person, a Christian. I had no identity of my own, simply following the tracks laid out for me as a child. I was not my own person, I was the schools person, taught to not; drink, smoke, swear, dress as I saw fit or even believe in things as I saw fit. This realization rattled my very core. I began to dump all of the baggage that I had carried with me and develop into my own person. By the time I started seventh grade I had become a completely different person. Not held back by the bonds of my previous beliefs. I began to skateboard, something that I had never even known existed in my
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