Bad Experiences Don’t Define You, But How You Handle Them Does

Meet Georgia. At sixteen, she is the youngest of my three granddaughters, and she’s in her final year of high school. She wants to be an electrician, and I believe she’ll be a great one because she has the power to excel at anything she chooses.

Below is an unedited copy of a short introductory essay she wrote for her grade twelve English class. The assignment was to describe a traumatic episode in your life and how you dealt with it. Personally, I think she has the makings of a great writer, but I may be a touch biased.

I was about to turn 7 in the year 2014, I was so excited that I couldn’t sleep until my birthday. For the first 8 days I didn’t sleep, then suddenly I got some news that broke my heart. I was sitting at the dinner table one night eating, then something weird happened, my mom came back to the table with some ice cream, as a kid I loved ice cream one of my favourite things to have as dessert, so I was excited for it. After we ate the ice cream my mom told us something that we didn’t expect, my grandfather died. We knew he was struggling with cancer, but my dad told us there was nothing to worry about as they had put him in a clinical trial. When my mom told me this, I dropped my spoon and started to cry, as I looked around the table at my siblings, I was the only one crying, I was the only one that really had a connection with him, so I felt more emotions. Keep in mind when this happened it was Eleni’s 8th birthday, the date was November 9th, 2014, the exact date of Eleni’s birthday. There was no funeral for him in Canada, but because he was Greek he wanted to get buried where he was raised. On the tallest mountain in Greece Mount Olympus, he was raised in the highest village on the mountain, he had goats for neighbours. But my dad brought his body there to be buried, after that I didn’t see my dad, because when he came back from Greece he had a cold. 

The date was December 9th, 2014, the exact date, a month later. I was now 7 because my birthday had passed a couple of weeks before, I was in my class at Viscount and suddenly I was called down to the office because I was going home early. My mom showed up to my school with sunglasses on and said, “we are going to grandmas”, we all agreed and got into the car. When we arrived at my grandmothers, we saw that our church minister was there, Ruth was her name. We were told to sit on the couch and listen to what my mom had to say, she looked at us and started crying, because we were so close to our mom we started to cry to, not even knowing why. Then she told us, “I am so sorry, your dad died”, we looked up at her and started to cry. My younger brother was 5 at the time and the only thing he said was “can I go play with Legos now?”, he didn’t know what was happening. We cried for hours and hours until there were no more tears. We got home that night and went right to bed. The next day we were told we will not be going back to school until the last week of January. One of the worst days of my life was his funeral, it was a 3-day event, a wake, then his funeral, then burial, I will never forget the day I stood over my father and said goodbye for the last time.

A couple of years later my mom finally told my sister and I what the actual cause of his death was, and we were told right then and there he had a heart attack caused by a drug overdose, it was cocaine lased with fentanyl. 

Today I am a student athlete with a G2 drivers license about to graduate high school, no thanks to him, but thanks to my mom. This just proves you don’t need a father to be a great person, and that you don’t need 2 parents to have a steady life. You write your own story, even if you had a hard time to begin with. If you believe in something, whether it be to get a new job or to start over you can do it because there is nothing you can’t do.

What do you think? I am very proud of the way my daughter rose to the situation and raised her four young children. We all face obstacles in life, but we don’t all handle them the same way. Be the person you were meant to be. Don’t whine and cry, blame everyone on the hand life dealt you, but instead, pick yourself up, and aim for the stars. Be like Georgia. Be your own success story.