The Life of Me

So, time to talk about myself I guess, and what a better place to start other than when I was born. I was born on April 26, 1998 right here in my hometown Chicago. Currently I am 15 and in my Sophomore year of high school, but before I speak about my current self, it's better to speak about my younger self. When I was born, I lived in a house by Midway. That home, sadly does not exist anymore as it was tore down and made into a parking lot. Due to this, when I was 3, my family moved to Iowa for two years where my little brother was born. Me being 5 at the time, I don't recall much from that point in my life, but I do know that immediately right after my brother was born, we came back to Chicago and I've been here ever since. Growing up, I lived in a small apartment. From this apartment, I started going to preschool at the local school, Daniel J. Corkery. Now, my elementary was not the best school, it was poorly funded and the students that attended, did not care much for the learning. Despite it's flaws, there were still teachers there that did their best with what they had. These teachers were passionate about teaching us, even if most of the students fooled around most of the time. Luckily, I was not the only student there who actually wanted to learn, I made another friend, a childhood friend, by the name of Manuel. Me and him stuck together a lot during our elementary school, as there was no one like us in that school, at least not yet. Coming into middle school, I met others like me, they payed attention, and they worked hard. It was through this, that I made my first friendly rival, a boy by the name of Cain. We would always try to 1-Up each other, not wanting the other to get the best of us. We kept at this pace up until 8th grade, where he started to hang out with the shady kids of my school, and when he went down that path, he did not recover from it. During 8th grade, our school was crazy about the high school choices, most of the kids in my school took the easy route and they went to my neighborhood high school, which in my eyes, was just basically another Corkery. Only me and Manuel refused to go there, and instead tried our luck at getting into a Selective Enrollment School, we applied, we took the test, and both of us had passed, we had been accepted into one of the greatest and brightest schools in Chicago, Whitney M. Young. My parent's joy was overwhelming, they were so proud of me, and to make it better, I had graduated 8th grade as Valedictorian. My dad has had a huge impact on who I am today, he inspired who I wanted to be, after graduation, he spent 1000$ on Photoshop and a 3D modeling program so I could start early. Immediately I had fallen in love with the concept of design and building, it inspired me to want  become an architect, to make the creative images in my head a reality. Also during that summer, before I went into my Freshman year of high school, my dad got an nice little body shop up in Kankakee, my dad had his own business, and with that, over the summer I started to go to work with him, this is where my passion for cars started. At that time I started learning different things such as how cars worked and how to repair them as well. The work wasn't easy, but one thing always made it worth it, my dad would say, "We are working for something ours, we work for it, and we benefit from it." Of course I stopped going for the last few weeks of summer to fulfill my school duties. That's when I entered Freshman year of high school, it was very nerve racking at first, I was somewhere where I had never been, for the first week it was very confusing, but I survived it. I made a ton of new friends that shared the same passion for learning as me. So far, everything is going well for me, I have a loving family that supports me, friends who I can rely on, and a bright future ahead of me, I wouldn't change my life for anything. That is the life of me.