Effect Essay: The Road

When I was younger I had it all mapped out just so. I knew exactly what I wanted to be, a lawyer, mom and well, awesome. It seemed so perfect, I would have the perfect number of kids, two, and they would be perfect. It was always sunny, the trees always green and the sky always blue. Maybe this road I had planned to travel down only existed in my imagination, but you could not have convinced me otherwise. Never could I have imagined that the road I actually travelled down was not sunny all the time, nor the sky blue or trees always green. In fact, I missed the part where I was going to walk down a winding road that branched off so many times and seemed more like a deliberate scheme to confuse me.

Although I had this vision of perfectness for the future, we all know that cliche saying, "life is what happens when you are busy making other plans." As much as I hate to admit it, that is exactly what happens. As I bounded down the road with my hair blowing in the breeze the trees started to turn color and the sky began to fill with clouds. I realized that after high school, there is not perfect place to go to school. A lot of consideration and contemplation must be put into such an important decision. I realized that law school was absolutely not for me. I quickly stumbled upon my first major pot hole shortly after graduation. I thought everyone was honest and trustworthy and found out that most people are in fact not. I had my identity stolen and quickly became tangled in a mess.

Once I worked my way around that pot hole, a little worse off than before, I veered off a little bit of a cliff. I walked right to the edge, thought I could simply walk along the edge, even though I knew that the odds were I would fall over the edge and plunge to a vast sea of black emptiness. Which seems to be the worst kind of emptiness, it never seems to end, you reach out and nothing is all around you. It's almost as though the air is saturated in despair. I moved away from everyone and everything and started drinking and partying. Shocking little miss molly mormon. But, what I did not know was that this new pattern of behavior was going to cause me to plunge into a never ending pit of despair and anguish.

Once I got exhausted from what seemed like a never ending black empty hole, I clung onto anything I could grasp. I reached out to friends, church leaders and even co-workers, looking for a way to bring anything bright back into my life. I wanted a smooth road, one that was like the one I had dreamed of and imagined all through my early adolescent years. I had a feeling that the road I had envisioned didn't exist. When all my friends were getting married and starting families, I was pulling my life together and figuring out what I was going to do with it. I didn't know what to do with pot holes and cliffs and other obstacles that now seemed to block the road around every corner.

My life's road seemed to be on a string of never ending construction, you know, the kind in the summer when you are planning a road trip and it seems as though you are never going to get to your destination, because there's a chance you will turn old and gray right there in the car waiting to get through construction. The bumps in the road never seem to go away, the pot holes will occasionally get filled in, but at some point it seems that the road starts to look more familiar and the construction is not so bad. All the bumps in the road have brought some amazing scenery into my life. I thought that there was this perfect road and that I wanted to travel only in the sunshine, but the gray skies make the sunny ones that much more enjoyable.