FRO 14 DFA

College life is interesting. I like the freedom as opposed to the jail box I was in for four years during high school.

I’m broke. I spend the majority of my money on food. Not McDonalds, but, not super healthy food either. Besides, eating McDonalds would make me feel like an oily sponge, plus I won’t be as broke as I am now if McDonalds was the main thing I ate. I don’t know. I just don’t really eat as much as I would like to for now.

Coffee has now become the fuel I need to get through the day. I like hazelnut iced coffee with light ice only because I just found out that it costs more to have no ice, which doesn’t even make sense. I mean if anything, it should be less money for no ice. Ice is solidified water after all, so why is it more expensive without ice? I don’t know.

The library has become my second home. I spend most of my days in it. I think I’m going to start bringing a sleeping bag to sleep in the back corner on the fifth floor where it’s nice and quiet.

Starting new is a scary experience.

Meeting new people.

Being independent.

Counting on yourself.

Not knowing what to expect.

This is what I experienced on the first day of college.

As time passed,

I met new friends.

Started to experience the college life.

And learned the difference between high school and college.

College.

There is so much work to be done.

I don’t want to do anything, but I have to.

So much work to be done, but there’s not enough time.

Sacrificing my sleep to complete my work.

What is sleep?

Everything is so stressful that I just want to stop and drop dead on the floor.

Can’t I just go back in time to the days I don’t have to worry about anything?

I miss those times.

Snowboarding, skateboarding and photography are the things that have made me who I am today. I’ve been snowboarding for my whole life, starting from when I was 5 years old. When I was 4, my parents tried to get me to learn how to ski, but after one day I was demanding that they let me learn to snowboard instead. Now I’m 18 years old, and snowboarding is still something I look forward to every winter. As humans, we have not been blessed with the ability to fly, but when you’re going down a mountain at 40 miles per hour and airing a couple feet into the air, it’s almost as if you were flying. There was a point in my life where I could no longer sit around during the spring and summer waiting to go snowboarding again, and that’s why I started skateboarding. What skateboarding meant to me was that I no longer had to wait half a year waiting for the cold winter months to come back. Now, I was always flying. When it was hot outside, I was soaring down a steep hill in Spanish Harlem, or zipping around the bowl at my local skatepark. In the winter, I was cruising down mountains until I was physically unable to move.

Photography is my only hobby, which I’ve been doing for a few years now. I have recently stopped using digital cameras and only use film now. I believe that shooting with film cameras forces the photographer to put a lot more consideration into the composition of their photos instead of mindlessly clicking a camera button. I find it fun to develop photos too, because after a few weeks or months, you completely forget what is on a roll of film. Occasionally I’ll get back my pictures and I’ll have no idea when or where I took a picture. The transition from shooting digital to shooting only film was hard, since my favorite thing to take pictures of was skateboarders, and shooting skateboarders with a film camera was way harder than doing it with a digital camera.

On September 21^st, 2014 I attended the Climate March. This to me was a life changing event. 400,000 people showed up and it was the largest climate march in history. On the way there, I thought 20,000 people were going to show up, and I was thinking “oh, they’re just a bunch of hippies.” Nearly half a million people showed up, after talking to dozens of people that day, I realized that to change the world, you have to change yourself first. That day I learned that just eating meat is a huge factor in climate change, and just going from a meat eater to a vegetarian can cut your carbon footprint in half. Since then I have become strictly vegan, my dad is now a vegetarian and my mom has become a pescatarian.

I plan to leave New York City as soon as I can. The city has trapped me like a prisoner in a jailcell, and I’m just waiting for my sentence to be up, or for someone to bail me out. Nothing gets me through the day better than dreaming about living in the great outdoors.

I am Monica Mikolajczyk; I’m a skateboarder, a snowboarder, a photographer, a vegan and a dreamer.

I’m not incredibly resilient or as tough as nails, but I try my best. I don’t like letting minute conflicts and petty problems get to the best of me and divert my attention from more important experiences. I am a realist and am sometimes dubbed as a naysayer, but I feel as though it is more useful to consider the negative side of things very carefully rather than only focusing on the positive aspects to avoid disappointment and being let down.

Ever since I was a child, I have been stubborn about trivial matters and have a propensity to be easily annoyed or angered by certain things. I am working hard to rid myself of these toxic tendencies because I know that my psychological burdens will then be diminished. I know that during the times in which I have a cheerful disposition, I am a lot happier and generally more satisfied with the way things are in life. A mere human cannot control everything.

An important goal of mine is to learn to be more optimistic in sticky situations and be more tolerant of things I do not have power over. Conquering these obstacles will allow me to achieve immense personal growth as a young adult.