Prompt:
People respond to change in different ways. Some people tend to actively embrace and adapt to change, while others tend to resist change and prefer stability and familiarity. Which type of person are you? What do you want your readers to understand about embracing change or resisting change? Use specific experiences from your own life to develop and support your argument.
I see myself as someone who welcomes change and makes an effort to embrace it. As a first-generation immigrant, I have experienced an abundance of change in my life, including a complete shift in culture, environment, and language. In the beginning, I resisted most of the sudden changes in my life, refusing to speak to people around me because I couldn’t speak the language very well, rejecting invitations to certain events or gatherings because I didn’t understand the culture, and shying away from anything new in my environment because I was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. The constant resistance to change, the want to stay in the comfort of familiarity, feels as if I am watching my own life happen from the outside instead of actually living it. It wasn't until I was forced into a different kind of change that I understood how important it is to accept change and adapt.
One of the most impactful changes for me was tearing my ACL during a game in my freshman year. Before the injury, my identity was built almost entirely around being an athlete; my schedule, my friend group, and even my sense of self-worth revolved around practice and competition. When I went down on the field and felt my knee give out, it felt as if my entire sense of who I was was gone along with my injury. In the weeks that followed, I resisted this change too, refusing to accept that I couldn't just push through it the way I had pushed through everything else in my life. I think it was during recovery that I realized that accepting change is required in life.
By accepting that what has happened did happen, I slowly made progress in not only recovering my health but in developing who I can be without being an athlete. Resisting change, whether it's forced on us by circumstance or by our own fear of losing what feels familiar, often comes from a fear of losing the identity we've built our lives around. But embracing that change can reveal parts of ourselves we never would have found otherwise. If I had never left my home country, or never torn my ACL, I don't think I would have discovered how connected the mind and body really are, or the version of myself that knows healing happens not just in the body but in the mind as well.