Scholarship Application

Please describe in your own words a success story. This can be something in a previous work environment or something personal. Attach additional pages if needed.

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” –John Steinbeck

            I always had great grades in school and high marks on standardized tests. I had the best family ever, cool college friends, and supportive intimate relationships. After graduation my friends and family moved, a long term relationship failed, and future plans evaporated. I didn’t have the energy I was banking on to pursue a professional career in public health, and everything else I tried to do found a way to blow up in my face. I felt like I had lost twenty years of hard work in a year, so I stopped maintaining what little self-esteem I had left. I even began entertaining fantasies about ending my life, and that’s when Mom came and got me.

            I moved in with my aging grandmother across the street from my parents. I threw myself one-hundred-percent into a new job to escape my thoughts. This job became a walking mediation and eventually enabled me to regain financial independence. Sense of responsibility for my life returning, I joined the gym where I discovered yoga. My anatomical knowledge, religious streak, and physical ambition had been repurposed for my own healing.

            A year later, life is not perfect and neither am I, but I feel extremely blessed to enjoy its small triumphs and take its incoherencies less seriously. I get a little stronger and more consistent as I go and my growing capacity for compassion has improved every day. I expect to feel as though I have lost everything and everyone several more times in my life, but I’m finding it easier to avoid such thoughts- they make waste of now.

            Now I have more joy sharing this story with you than I would retelling my scholastic, nursing, or sales conquests. I composed this from my own new space. My bed is made, laundry done, with eight hours of work and an afternoon of climbing behind me. Ahead I have a shower, healthy dinner, and Game of Thrones mini-marathon with someone I respect and care about. I’m not the most impressive person I know, but I am good. I feel prepared for the next chapter in my life and hope it involves a career with Sunstone.