My mom moving away kind of forced me to mature. Just living with my dad, more disciplined and not having my mom around as much disciplined me more with just my dad. I think I was sad at first, but I kind of just accepted it and knew that there was nothing I could do about it. So, I kind of just turned it around and turned it into something that motivated me to try to be the best person for people around me. And I think it ultimately helped me.

I didn’t even know what to do with the moment because it’s such a big person in your life moving away. It just kind of happened. It’s pretty random. She just kind of moved.

My home life is pretty complicated. I know my mom is probably going through a lot of stress right now because she has like two jobs and stuff, and I’m really trying to help her out right now. And my mom and dad are kind of going through stuff.

I help my brother out with taking a shower. I pack our lunches. I try to help out on dinner and clean up around the house. My dad doesn’t help out a lot. My dad’s not giving her what she wants, I guess.

They’ve been together for 18 years, so it’s kind of like, they want to be separated, but we don’t have the money to do that. So they’re kind of like not together but still together.

When they fight it’s pretty bad. When they do fight, I kind of just laugh because like, ‘Why are you fighting? You’ve been together for 18 years.’

I kind of feel bad because I know my mom’s doing a lot for the family, and she’s been saying that she’s stressed a lot, and she’s tired. She has to go to work at 4 in the morning. I feel a little sad because I know she’s doing lot. I try to make her laugh when she is home because she barely sees us. I only see her in the morning, and when I get home. And that’s it.

I would say I’m close with my dad, too, but there are some days I just don’t talk to him, and then the next day we’re best buddies.

When he lost his mom and sister in the fire, he didn’t really say anything. He just kind of laid in his bed. He’s the kind of person that’s just like, chill. I try to look at everything with a good side. When I have something going on, like as an example someone being mean to me, I just try to put that as a challenge on myself and better myself.

Since wrestling season just started, I feel pressured to make the team, especially JV and varsity, and I’m trying to keep my grades up while doing it as well. The coaches really focus on your academics as well; they want you to keep them up because wrestling isn’t all just physical. It’s also mental. So, I feel it’s going to be harder to keep them up in the near future, especially when I won’t be home until 5 o’clock at night.

With the mental stress that comes along with losing and wanting to get better and having to go to school the next day like nothing happened, I feel like that’s hard. Though I do feel it has made me a better person mentally, and it’s gotten me over a lot of things that I have gone through. It’s just overall helped me, and the mindset wrestling gives you that if you can do one hard thing you can do anything.

Playing with my brother when we were close. We’re 17 months apart, so we grew up together, and he would play the things I wanted to, and I would play the things he wanted to. So, it was fun having a built-in friendship.

Now we like to go get coffee, and we just sit, and he tells me about his life, and I’m able to give him advice, and he will talk about it.

Seeing him come to this school and immediately jumping into football, because that like one of the main reasons we transferred here and just seeing how well he’s doing and the friends that he’s making, it just makes me happy for him.

It’s been hard because he’s super busy with sports, and I’m super busy, so we never really have much time to talk anymore, so we should just remember to make time for each other.

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Anthony Sola

To make my niece and nephew look up to me and make them proud. There’s definitely pressure on it because I want to be a role model in their life, and I want to be a big part of their life. When they were born, it was like my whole word. One of my favorite memories with them is probably their birthday parties or the moment they were in my hands for the first time.

I want to become a better person when I’m with them, and they give me more patience in life. I’ve learned off them. I want them to see me as a hardworking in the future. I want to be the person that they can talk to in the future when times get hard.

I’m just kind of scared that I’m not going to make it. Like in life pretty much — like I won’t be successful how I imagined my life to go. I just feel like I’m not smart. I’m smart, but I’m not school smart, and I feel like to be successful, school smart is what you need to be. Like college — scared I won’t go to college or I’m just going to fail. I want to go to — technically it’s not like a college, it’s sort of like a trade school, not really. It’s through an airline, and it’s like a school through that. It’s basically pilot school but through an airline.

I’m in the musical. I’m in tech. I’m the assistant stage manager, and it’s really demanding. At the same time, my dad is out of town for an emergency, a work thing, my mom is kind of on her own. My brothers and I, I have two brothers, and we all have sports and things, so she’s really stressed right now trying to make sure everything gets done.

My dad is in Chicago, but I think he’s going to end up being in North Carolina in a few days. It’s three weeks, so I think we have like two more weeks. A couple weeks before he left, he was in Tennessee. He runs the team — kind of like a SWAT team, so they get pulled to places sometimes.

I do try to help my mom, but there’s not a lot I can do. Because I’m also really busy, and I can’t drive or take my little brother to practices yet. I think it’ll be a lot easier when I can drive. She just has a lot to do. Her job is pretty demanding, so she has to do that and then at the same time. After the government shut down, my parents get money from the government, so they’re not getting paid, so were kind of in our savings.

We’re not like struggling, but it’s still kind of stressful at the same time the more you think about it. So, when the government shut down, we didn’t have a budget set up yet, so they can’t pay anybody, so they’ll get the pay from their jobs, but we aren’t currently getting money from the government. I do have some relatives on my dad’s side, but they also like a couple states away, so they couldn’t really help.

Musical practices are probably like the highlight of what’s going on right now, it’s like the only thing I really, really enjoy. I think the best lesson I’ve learned is like to appreciate everyone’s experiences because there’s a lot of different kinds of people from different places, and you have to kind of appreciate everyone’s backgrounds and their opinions and their beliefs.

I feel like I have to be something, or I’m a failure. For one thing, I’m an only child, so all the attention is on me. It’s really stressful because I play sports, and it’s hard to balance social, plus my parents make me do schoolwork every day.

I feel like I would actually be in a way worse spot. I’m very grateful. Right now, I am just sad because they do stuff, but all they want for me is to be successful, and I understand that. It’s just hard for me to understand everything.

I didn’t really care about school, but I wasn’t failing it because it was really easy for me. Then I got very behind, it was probably middle school like 7th or 8th grade, because I got injured and I couldn’t show up to school because I had a concussion. It just hit me because I realized that how serious this was. If I don’t do good in school, I don’t have any opportunities after high school, I can’t go to college, and it’s going to be hard to find a job with just a high school diploma or without a high school diploma if I have to drop out. So I just got to do my thing.

My biggest struggle is probably maintaining my time and finding time to relax outside of school and sports because I do soccer and basketball for school at the moment but I also do track in the spring and sometimes in the summer. right now I feel like it’s been kind of a struggle to finish like all my work on time because u feel like I’m getting distracted and like a lot of time is getting taken away because of the sports that I do because I have basketball from three to five after school and then there is soccer which depends on the day but usually an hour and a half long. I get like really tired and not want to do my homework and procrastinate so then I get behind on everything and just don’t have time then I have to make it up and feel like I’m getting stressed because of that. I practice on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursday for soccer and on Monday it is from 5:30 to 7 and on Wednesdays and Thursdays it’s from 6:30 to 7:45. Usually I’m going from basketball because basketball is every day of the week from three to five except for Saturday and Sunday straight to soccer and then I have to come home, take a shower, eat, and spend time with my family. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have enough time to do that where I’ll be really tired, and honestly, I just procrastinated a lot of my work, and then I get behind and my grades will start to drop.

During cross country season, I had a lot of stress between trying to be good at cross country. I had a lot of stress about the meets and races because I just wanted to do good, and I wasn’t very confident in myself about being able to do good. I wasn’t getting medals a lot, and I was kind of getting even worse because all I wanted to do is make it to state. And I ended up getting there, but it was a very hard struggle. But a few of my races didn’t go how I wanted them to go because from the stress and everything. We think my stomach is hurting from that, and I get weird shooting pains in my stomach. That is very hard to stand up, and it caused me not to do good in a lot of meets.

But when I made it to state, I was really ready, but I was very, very, very nervous. One was at Joplin, and then State was at Columbia, and my parents traveled all the way out there just to see me crying and not do my best. I had to push through and just finish, which I did, but I did not get the results I wanted, and I felt like I let down my parents and my teammates, especially my coaches. But they told me it was OK because I mean, I still made it to state as a freshman.

I keep getting myself too busy with work and school events and hanging with my friends. I tend to do a bunch of different things on the same day and just not really realize it until the day that it happens.

There will be some days when I have a bunch of different things going on and some where I have absolutely nothing, so I just need to start planning out my days.

When my mom and dad were in the early stage of like their soon divorce, I was really close with both of my parents, especially my dad. And when we moved here, they started fighting a lot, and I guess I felt like it was my responsibility to fix them because I wanted them to be OK.  And when I couldn’t, I just felt like I didn’t have a purpose. It affects me, but it doesn’t affect me as much as it did. Like, I don’t sit there and cry about it like I used to.

My biggest problem is probably, I’m not too sure what I’m going to want to do when I’m like 45. I don’t know what I’m going to do to pursue my future. I don’t have any plans.

Normal jobs, an office job or plumbing or something like that, they don’t really interest me. Sure, they make good money. It’s not like I can see myself doing that for the rest of my life. They don’t really interest me.

If I really had to choose, I would do nothing and just have money, you know? But jobs I’ve been thinking about are probably going into the Marine Corps or being a mechanic.

The military, because most of my family is in the military. My cousin is in the Marine Corps. My friend’s brother is in the Marine Corps. My great grandpa was in the Army, and my other grandpa was also in the Army.

And then mechanics. My dad is currently a mechanic, and he’s been someone I look up to. Most kids want to do what their role models do.

I’m still not 100 percent sure because those, especially being in the military, that probably won’t last me forever, so I’m not sure what I would do after that.

My dad is my role model because he’s been there and he’s somebody that is doing pretty well, and I can look at him and be like, ‘Yeah, he is doing pretty good, that’s what I want to do.’ I’m still not 100 percent sure because those, especially being in the military, that probably won’t last me forever, so I’m not sure what I would do after that.

Middle school. I felt really lost. It was such a hard time period in my life, and I was going through a lot of emotions, and I was also dealing with a lot of mental health issues. So, I feel like that’s the time when I was definitely lost the most.

Honestly my mom kind of got me through it, and she helped me along the way because she knew I was struggling a lot. I always wanted to go home during school because I didn’t like middle school, but she helped me find solutions to what I was feeling because she knew that that’s how I was feeling.

Some of the trauma that middle school gave me — not even like in the school, but like within those years — that’s when I started to realize my mental health, and I started to get affected by it. But I definitely still struggle with it a little bit.