forgetting the pasT and moving on

By Kathy C

Everybody in this world has once made bad decisions. For some, such decisions can be so bad that they want to move to a different state just to forget it. Julissa Ramirez, a fourteen year old freshman at Yerba Buena High School, has started planning her future, trying to move forward and forget the decisions she made in the past.

Living her past and present life in San Jose, Ramirez dreams of the idea of living in New York. She loves to think about experiencing the city’s nightlife while listening to Lana Del Ray.

To her, San Jose has always been a boring city with no city life. Ramirez thinks that life in San Jose will just be moody and disappointing. She doesn’t want to live that life. She thinks that living in New York will be simply more exciting and fun. She has a feeling that New York will live up more to her standards of life and fit in more with her aesthetic.

“Becoming a lawyer has always been a dream of mine, I think that New York really fits in with my career goals.” Ramirez said.

She plans to study law in New York to become one of the top lawyers there. “Honestly, I just want to move to New York, and this seems like a good opportunity.” said Ramirez

Even though moving to New York is a big and exciting experience it does scare her to leave her parents behind because of their age. “It does change, sometimes I get really sad thinking about it but then I think that they’ll still be here and I know it’s far but I’ll miss them a lot.”

During her time in middle school Ramirez has experienced making decisions that she regrets when she thinks about it. “I didn’t really like my personality. It was really annoying and it didn’t fit up to the standard of who I would want to be,” said Ramirez.

She gets nervous and doesn’t like to go into details about what happened in middle school. “Nothing, just second hand embarrassment, when I remember the choices I made.” This is why Ramirez wants to move to New York. She wants to be able to forget what happened in middle school.

She mentioned that her middle friends did have an impact on her decisions because they were very immature and always peer pressured her into making those decisions. The people that she would hang out with in class were also extremely immature, they were troublemakers.

Thinking back on the decisions she made, made her extremely insecure. She found it difficult to make new friends and be able to speak freely in front of them.