Coping with Stress and Depression - Essay Example

Even though I woke up every day to go to an elementary school, I was always frightened by the other students, they always mocked us and even bully us and made fun of us because of our culture, and to top it all up our Islamic background. The other students from the American culture resisted associating with us, I was eliminated from them, even during class time. My mother would come during lunchtime to have lunch with me wearing her scarf, as usual, the other student abused her as being illiterate and old type and to top it up, stupid.

Crying became part of my everyday life. I could cry whenever I thought of all the humiliation back at school and how the other students make fun of my mother, she would ask me what is wrong but kept lying to her that am suffering from a stomach-ache Riding with other students in a school bus was a big blow, I was always separated from them, they wouldn’t want to sit next to me nor even talk to me, and loneliness invaded my life. Things became tough, I even avoided going outside for races in fear of being subjected to everyday discrimination.

As a result, I distracted myself with reading books. This situation made my parents transfer us to study abroad to evade discrimination, however, this was not the case, our problems worsened. Being 14 years, in turkey, the effect was the same, the other students discriminated against us and never wanted to associate with us, always perceived and called outsiders. This made me lose hope for a better life, my brother was severely affected by these sad events, he visited psychologists and psychiatrists for help but all were in vain.

After some months in Turkey, I joined the Robotic team and started doing video games in my 9th grade. I associated with friends and only people who could not judge according to my background, this mechanism actually worked for me, I felt appreciated and realized that I had hidden in discrimination. I played online video games and made friends all over the world and with different backgrounds. Being engaged in video games, I overcame loneliness and started having a new meaningful life. We appreciated each other even though I did not know my friends, our personalities synched, and people were not described according to their religion, culture, or race.

Gaming helped me to keep and embrace my identity, get new friends and even help those who were facing the same challenges did, I talked to them to be who they were irrespective of the discrimination they were undergoing. My brother was adversely affected and stayed in the hospital for a while, when he came back I talked to him, helped him to recover from all the discrimination. This year was tough, I had to give up some of my classes to take care of my brother, I ended AP Calculus and AP Lang class with fewer grades with a “C” in Calculus and “B” Lang, and gave up extra-curricular activities, in which made me have a retake this year.

After his recovery, I went back and put effort into my studies.