From the Inside Out (eBook)

Katherine Kim (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
80 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
9798350945102 (ISBN)

Infos

Find inspiration to overcome your struggles with 'From the Inside Out.'

The author lives in Scottsdale, AZ and graduated from high school in 2024. She has traveled to over 25 countries and loves experiencing the richness of cultural diversity through interactions with the local people, food, and geography. She enjoys cooking to celebrate special occasions; shooting arrows in her backyard; and playing various musical instruments, including the clarinet, piano, drums, and bass guitar.

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This uplifting memoir follows a high school girl's journey through adolescence. Complicated situations with her friends, experiences with her family during the pandemic, and bittersweet memories with her volleyball coach led to unbelievable transformations in her life. She hopes to inspire other teenagers to find hope in their struggles and become open-minded individuals.

Textauszug

OHANA

Most people believe that their families are unique and set apart. Any family holds fast to its own set of traditions, customs, values, and events that are integral to its history and interrelationships. These building blocks of a family include certain religious beliefs, yearly visits with grandparents, special holiday celebrations, and simple things like sharing a daily meal. All of these beloved aspects of family life came undone for many people when the coronavirus pandemic descended upon the world in 2020, the first one since the influenza pandemic in 1918. It was a globally challenging time for all aspects of society, but it was particularly difficult for many people at the family level—fathers and mothers lost their jobs, students in all grades were forced to participate in asynchronous learning, and incoming high school freshmen across the country had to experience one of their most pivotal years of life online.

In spite of all this, especially having to enter high school through the Internet, I am grateful to God that we were able to persevere through the COVD-19 pandemic. If not for the pandemic, my family might not have experienced the wonderful transformation that it did, my heart might not have been softened to accept the truth and change, and my physical health might have continued on its pre-pandemic downward spiral. Don’t get me wrong—the isolation and the toll COVID-19 took on my mental health was not fun and I would not wish that experience on my worst enemy. However, when I look back on 2020 today after gaining perspective over the past few years, the long-term manifestations of the pandemic have been nothing but blessings for me as I look forward to the rest of my life. I will delve deeper into what exactly those blessings are and why I consider them as such. I would also like to share with you how those blessings have shaped me physically and spiritually and how they have established in me a firm foundation for the rest of my life.

One of those blessings is how COVID-19 affected my family. We were thrust into a situation that we had no control over, as were most people, and we used our creativity and resourcefulness to navigate our way through it. The pandemic not only brought us together by keeping us physically in the house, but we were able to hone our creativity and uncover valuable attributes about ourselves that will help us in the future. Through resilience, we were able to make the best of a rough circumstance.

As a thirteen-year-old, I was certain that my family was fairly close-knit, a family that rejoiced in one another’s successes and commiserated together in our failures, a family that listened to each other, and a family that simply cared for one another. I wanted this sort of close relationship with my family and I truly believe that my family had a special bond that was beyond that of other families. However, when March 2020 came and went and the world was descending into the chaos that would become the COVID-19 pandemic, I came to the realization that I would have to spend every waking moment with my family, initially for two weeks as most experts at that time predicted. However, it was clear that the coronavirus was not going away anytime soon and we would continue to feel the reverberations of the pandemic in the years to come.

I understood that I would be isolated with my family in my house for an indefinite amount of time. I always thought that my brother was cute and adorable, but now his loud and obnoxious dialogue with his gaming friends would be a daily part of my life as well. As I was listening to my brother engage in an intense gaming session next door, I came to a startling yet inevitable revelation—the only form of meaningful social interaction I would have for the remainder of this so-called pandemic was the cashier at the grocery store and my immediate family members. What happened in the next few months confirmed not only that my family did have a special bond, but that through that bond we were able to forge a deeper and more satisfying relationship with one another as we were locked up together in the house. The first step was navigating an important series of dates immediately following the outbreak of the pandemic—our birthdays.

My mother’s birthday is April 30. Mother’s Day 2020 was on May 10, my brother’s birthday is June 9, Father’s Day was on June 21, my birthday is July 17, and my father’s birthday is September 10. Governor Doug Ducey officially ordered all Arizonans to stay at home and effectively shut the state down on March 30, 2020, allowing only essential workers to continue working. Therefore, these important dates in our lives immediately followed the outbreak of the pandemic as Arizona was about to enter two months of an official lockdown. As confusing and chaotic as the world seemed at that time, we were able to block out the noise and focus on these dates as more than simply an excuse to buy gifts—we decided to make events out of them.

My parents, like most parents of teenagers who have probably had their share of birthday parties, never wanted to do anything spectacular to celebrate their birthdays. Whenever my brother and I would ask them what they wanted for their birthdays, they would always respond with a simple “nothing” and then say that they only asked that we continued to behave like godly men and women and showed kindness toward one another. On the other hand, my brother and I were young and wanted what most children wanted on their birthdays—a big birthday party with all of our friends. Because our birthdays were in the summer, my brother and I often celebrated while we were traveling on vacation. While we did not get to have our big birthday celebrations with our friends as often as we would have liked, we still enjoyed spending our birthdays on our trips away from home in foreign countries. But it was clear that the summer of 2020 was going to be unlike any other summer in history.

In that summer of 2020, we would not be traveling due to all of the travel restrictions, and we would be spending our summer not exploring a foreign culture, but in the comfort of our home. The huge birthday parties my brother and I desired probably would not happen either because public health officials advised us to stay away from each other, although the restrictions in Arizona were not as strict as those in other states. This was certainly demoralizing for us—no birthday parties and no traveling—yet it stirred our creative energy. These unfortunate circumstances gave our family no other choice but to celebrate our birthdays at home with only each other for company.

Food was often the language of love in our family. We expressed love to one another in many ways, through words of affirmation, quality time together, giving and receiving gifts, and serving the community together. But it was through the time spent on preparing and enjoying meals together that our family bonded. My mother would always and continues to make breakfast for my brother and me before we went to school, I would regularly bake a variety of pastries and cakes, and my father would grill his famous rib eye steaks with onions and asparagus every Saturday night for dinner. While I have fond memories of sharing these meals at home, my family also enjoyed dining out, from elegant restaurants to quick fast-food joints. We loved the sophisticated dining experience at a Michelin star restaurant, but we also cherished picking up a couple of Big Macs from McDonalds or ordering takeout from Papa John’s. In a nutshell, our lives revolved around food.

The onset of the pandemic not only brought about drastic and lasting changes to the restaurant industry; it shook up the foundation of our family as well. One of the most memorable aspects of our travels was the variety of cuisines we were able to taste, from authentic Mexican to Chinese to Icelandic. Not only were we unable to travel, we also could not enjoy new and exotic food. In addition, as the restaurant industry came to a screeching halt, it was difficult to even get hamburgers for takeout. Many dine-in restaurants closed permanently and take-out meal transactions had to be done with a mask and through social distancing, a weird phenomenon in itself. Drive-thru services were temporarily halted and a whole host of regulations was instituted regarding food delivery. It did not help that we knew very little about the coronavirus itself. If we had known then what we know now, perhaps many of the draconian measures would not have been employed. Regardless of how things should have gone and how they actually did transpire, the restaurant and food industry was forever radically altered and we all had to adapt. As the world adapted, our family had no choice but to adjust and stir up our creative juices. All of the cooking we had done until then had been a practice run for the big game—gourmet meals at home during lockdown.

Mother’s Day was the first “at-home” pandemic event that my father, my brother, and I attempted to make as grand as we had in previous years without going to a restaurant. As has always been the Kim family tradition, we blended my mother’s birthday with Mother’s Day due to the proximity of dates (April 30 and May 10). A week prior to Mother’s Day, my dad and I texted back and forth nonstop, discussing how we were going to make this plan work. Although our family cooked for each other very often, we never had to cook a meal for a special occasion to be served in our very own home (we left that to the professional chefs at the restaurants we went to). We decided on a simple and easy menu that both my dad and I knew we could execute to perfection: filet mignons served with roasted potatoes and asparagus...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.3.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kinder- / Jugendbuch
• ISBN-13: 9798350945102 / 9798350945102