Who have I been? Who will I be? 

Childhood (I’m 17 so basically my whole life):

When I picture my life I see moving boxes. I lived in eleven different homes before I was ten, and five different states, and as I’ve grown, so have those numbers. 

I was born to an eighteen-year-old who was trying to finish high school, work, and who had moved out of home all while having a newborn baby. It would be completely safe to say that that shaped both mine and my mother’s life. I’ve spent most of my life privy to all the details about my family that my mother wouldn’t tell any of her other children. A perk of being the firstborn, I suppose. My aunt says it’s because my mother and I grew up together. Seventeen was not a convenient or planned time for her to get pregnant, I’m sure, but it’s led to me being in the know about all the family secrets I’m sure my brothers and sister won’t know about until they’re much older than I was when I learned them. Most of my familial roots are in a town in Washington, that I could navigate perfectly if only it looked the same as it did eight years ago. 

I was seven when my father adopted my brother and I. It’s a fact that my brother mostly forgets about, but as I was a little older, I remember more. What it was like before, when my mom was a young single mother, and even before that when our biological father was around. Now I have three siblings, and I’ve moved a total of sixteen times, to eight different states, including Alaska, where I’ve now lived for a month.

As my family has grown with more and more siblings, and it is no longer my mother and I braving the world together, it’s easy to see the big differences in how we’ve been raised. My mother has always done the best that she could with what she had, but that doesn’t change the fact that my mother was young when she had me and did a lot of things differently than she does with my siblings today. My siblings’ relationship with religion, for instance, is very different from mine. I spent four years trying to get out of going to church on Sundays because it’s not something I personally believe in, because I wasn’t raised with God from a young age. But My brothers and sister have no doubt about his existence, because that’s how my mother and father raised them. 

I shaped my family. I was the firstborn. My mother knew better with each passing child, and when at fifteen my aunt got pregnant, when I was two years old, she only knew she could do it because of her months spent with me and my mother, helping to raise me. She knew how she did and didn’t want to raise her son because she’d helped do it all first with me. She said it made her a better mother. It also made me and my cousin very close. Although I am two years older than him, he has never been too much smaller than me, and is in fact now about a foot taller than me. He is family, but growing up it always felt like he was just a built in best friend. 

Active duty in the military meant that my father moved often, and my family and I moved with him. It came with starting school as much as already a month through the school year, losing friends almost as fast as I could make them, and my psyche having its own internal built-in alarm clock that conveniently tells me when it’s time to get out of dodge and move again. It’s also come with making some pretty good friends all around the country. When I was ten, I moved from Washington State, a place where I was surrounded by family, to New Jersey, and I was devastated. Looking back, I never really enjoyed living there, but I did make some good friends, including my best friend, Zoe.

Roots:

I’m descended from the Ponca tribe in Nebraska, and distantly from somewhere in Italy. I, admittedly, know very little about it. I know that my great grandmother tracked down someone in her lineage that came to America from Italy, and that my grandfather was from the Ponca tribe in Nebraska, before he was orphaned and fostered outside of the tribe. Most of what I know is only about the people I know, or that my mother knows. Beyond that is somewhat of a mystery. That doesn’t mean though, that I’m not a bit interested. I know that my mother doesn’t know much about our lineage either, and that’s why I don’t know more myself. That didn’t stop me from appearing at the monthly Native American meetings while residing in Texas. The meetings were, admittedly, more focused on tribes along the coastal bend and in Mexico, as it was closer to where I lived, but I was still taken with the idea of learning anything about the culture I come from. 

Current:

I’ve lived in Alaska for about a month now. It’s definitely not one of my favorite places to live, and as far as connection goes, I only have a connection to here because it’s currently where my family lives. I’m sure that once I move, I’ll have made some memories that I’ll remember fondly, but to be perfectly honest I don’t think I’ve really liked most of the places I’ve lived until at least about a year of being there. Alaska is beautiful, but Juneau is isolated, and I miss the family and friends I used to get to see in other places I’ve lived. 

Social Work, How and Why I Got Here:

Social work is one of many career paths I’ve contemplated. I’ve gone from publishing to book editing to architecture to forensic work to the military to psychology and more. I’ve been scrambling for what I want to do with my life for years. This class is one way of me trying to figure out what I want. I’ll be able to tell if I enjoy the field enough to look into it more going forward. I couldn’t lie and say it doesn’t sound appealing though. Substance abuse is something that a lot of my family deals with, which has understandable made me interested in it, and I’d love to be able to help others with the same problems. The same sort of idea comes with helping veterans. My father’s in the military and I’ve had more in my family who have been also. I’d love to be able to say that I can help people who have and are going through much of the same things. But to be a child social worker would also be something I’d like to explore. So it’s safe to say that if I choose to go into the field of social work I’d definitely have more than one option that I’m interested in. 

I think knowing people who could’ve been helped or have been helped by social work is what really started to drive me in this direction. A lot of my family deals with a multitude of things, as everyone does, and I’d like to understand where they come from and also how to help them. Going to therapy is probably what really started to push me to social work, though. I looked at my therapist and thought, “What if I could do this for somebody?” and I sort of spiraled down different career paths from there and settled on social work. 

I think that ethics surrounding work in social work are sort of just amplified versions of my own ethics as a person. Of course, you have to respect each individual as a person and be mindful of everybody’s different beliefs and that their ethics and morals might not match my own. Social work is a human service job and that’s always important to remember.