1I- Listen Intently, I Beg of you.

As students, we are forced to sit through tedious lectures.  We hear the same messages about drugs, sex, discrimination, along with many other topics.  Although I never took these talks as a joke, I never left a talk feeling changed.  I continued on with my life, without thinking much about what I had heard.  I would not sit and ponder the complexities of the situations.  This is what teachers had always hoped you would do.  But lets be real. Most of these lectures seemed to have no relevance in our lives at the time.  Going into the lectures provided during welcome weekend, I had already prepared myself for the same situation to reoccur.  The second Chris Herren was introduced, I was hooked.

From a young age we are taught to not drink and not do drugs.  Growing up in a strictly Catholic family, this never seemed to apply to me since I had no intentions to do so.  As a grew my own sense of self, I also established my own beliefs that varied from the rest of my family.  Freshman year of high school I decided I was going to declare myself an Agnostic instead of Roman Catholic.  People expected that my morals would falter.  I stayed strong and did not drink or smoke as a graduated from one year to the next.

 By the time my senior year had rolled around my life had completely changed.  I had lost all of the people who had formerly been my friends, I was rarely home, and I began evolving into a girl who occasionally partied and smoked.  I never did these things because I wanted to, but simply because it was my safe haven.  It was my place to go when I was tired of feeling the way I did.  It was my escape.

I became more accustomed to casually seeing people I know doing drugs.  I never thought much of it because I was so immersed in this life style.  I never realized until that day how quickly things could escalate.  Freshman year of high school I completely despised the thought of people smoking, yet here I was, smoking up to 5 times a day.  I knew I didn't want to be that person, but I could not stop myself from acting like the person I had become.  Chris Herren's speech is what smacked me back into reality.

You never think it could be you.  You will never become those people you hear about in the news.  Rehab? That's for addicts. The next thing you know, you're sticking needles in your arm.

I may have been imagining it, but I felt as if through out his speech, he had been looking straight into my eyes.  He knew my secret.  He knew that I could have easily been the person to follow in his footsteps.  I was the girl who constantly denied that something this negative could happen to me. Once I admitted to myself this, I felt a shift.  My life was about to change.

When you are left speechless, with tears ready to breach the outer most rim of your eye, you know.  This is your time to change.  If a heroin addict of 18 years can be happy just being him, I could do the same.  I will follow the words of one of the most inspirational speakers I had ever witnessed.  I was finally going to happy "just being me."