Showing posts with label Jia Wen Tang. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jia Wen Tang. Show all posts
Friday, August 23, 2013
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Carmen's Peer Profile of Laura
Profile
Assignment on Laura
On
April 20th of 1995, a girl named Laura Silvestre was born into this
world. She was not only born as the daughter of a successful father who has
made a career in dentistry but she would soon realize that her legacy was to
continue the family line of high-degree professions. As this Dominican origin
family continued to raise Laura with high standards, she soon became an
English/Spanish fluent bilingual speaker, which would prove efficient in her
later years. The expectations rose as her older cousins started to attend prestigious
schools such as Cornell and Harvard University.
In her early days, Laura would enjoy watching a show called The Little Couple from the television
channel TLC, which talked about a neonatologist and telemarketing businessman
(the two main characters) that had just married and both suffer from dwarfism.
Although Laura has always found joy in attending to little kids, this show
further encouraged her to become a neonatal doctor in order to care for
premature babies. As she entered high school with the mindset to study biology,
she became an honors student who juggled schoolwork and her hobby to cheerlead.
When she started her new journey in The Mary
Louis Academy, she joined cheerleading. Since then, cheerleading became a
spirited hobby, a way to escape from pressure, and her life. Not long after,
she fell into the habit of staying after school everyday to practice her new
routines and cheers, thus cheerleading grew to be a big part of her life. This
hobby had also beneficially created a structured schedule for her and, without
knowing it, her daily routine had turned into being in school for six hours,
homework at the school library for the next two, and then cheerleading practice
from 6 to 9 P.M. If she didn’t have to return home for dinner and sleep, her
high school would actually have been her home.
Eventually, she came to meet a
fellow cheerleader during her after school practice named Chelsea, who had just
joined the team, started to join Laura in her late practice hours and, soon
enough, they bonded during those late nights. Her new friend had quickly turned
into her best friend. As friendships bloomed, and her parents became more
considerate towards her needs to be more of an individual, her hobby to
cheerlead developed into her passion as the years passed in Mary Louis.
Laura considers cheerleading
practice the biggest stress reliever in her life but unfortunately, uncontrollable
anxiety had slowly developed during her years at Mary Louis. The irrepressible
shaking that occurs with the slightest bit of nervousness Laura feels
repeatedly threatens her performance as a cheerleader and as a student; it has
followed her throughout her high school career.
The first time she had to perform,
Laura cried worrying about a specific stunt she had to do. Her hands quivered
rapidly and her coach, not having enough time to think of a solution, said,
“Stop crying, you’ve done it plenty of times before and you can hit it.” That
gave Laura a slight boost of confidence but the confidence vanished as quickly
as it had came when she stepped onto the mat in front of hundreds of people.
The speed of her heartbeat was that of an anvil dropped from a ten story
building and as she attempted the stunt she was worried about that whole time,
she fell. When they got to a waiting room, Laura burst into tears and
immediately started apologizing and blaming herself.
There were numerous times when Laura
would get anxiety about as horrible as the first time she performed. After a
while, she finally realized that it was because of her urge to blame herself
and put all that weight that she feels about something onto herself that
created her anxiety. She has yet to realize that she may already have found a
way to conquer her anxiety but as I interviewed her, she told me of a wonderful
moment in her life when she was able to acknowledge her own anxiety and tell
herself that she did nothing wrong. It took her about a year or so to
acknowledge that it wasn’t her fault when a specific friend of hers did not
tell her in person that she was a lesbian. The anxiety built up for those few
years and finally, she realized it was going nowhere and she needed to just
move on instead of asking herself what she did wrong. Laura’s anxiety seems to
come from constant worry over important subjects in her life which is why she
has anxiety very often in school but whether it is anxiety from school or her
personal life, she has overcome it all and I believe she will succeed to do so
even in the future.
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