For my my insecurities and make me into the person that I now AM. 

WLLN: 

A meaningful moment that happened in my life was when I listened to an influencer named Noel Deyzel, his speech inspired me to do better for myself and take self-improvement more seriously. After listening to Noel, I decided to take care of myself more by going to the gym, having a skin routine, and working on myself as a person such as my behavior towards others, always trying to give a helping hand. At some point of my life, I started to struggle with my weight and I was very insecure about it and my acne. At points, I would try to make a change in my life but it never lasted. Noel came off very relatable to me in his speech and that’s why I think it changed my perspective on life. We only have one life, let’s make sure we’re happy to the best of our ability. I’ve educated myself on how to build muscle, create a diet for myself, and balancing my social life with school work, friends, and family. In his household, exercise wasn’t really looked upon as something that we should do. I wasn’t really encouraged to go out and exercise by my family. However, ever since I began starting to work out, a couple of months later my brother would begin to join me occasionally to work out.

I hope to change the culture for the future generation of my family and have them exercise from a young age and have them enjoy it, whether that’s from having the blessing of bringing a child in the world myself or my brother having his own children. Going to the gym and trying to maintain a good diet meant that I had to change what I ate, coming from a middle eastern family was sorta tricky at the start because my mother felt as if I hadn’t liked her cooking but it wasn’t that at all. I had to fit in a certain amount of protein with a certain amount of calories, I couldn’t go over the calories if I wanted to keep this goal of mine, So I started making my own food for a certain amount of time, Chicken and Rice, Ground Beef, are some examples of what I was eating. Eventually, my mother decided to help me with my goal and help me meal prep my food. She started encouraging my diet and my fitness goals and I was very relieved but also happy that she knows what I’m doing is better for myself. It’s hard to convince your parents that they need to change something, especially middle eastern parents. After a while, I was back in school for my senior year since the last 1 and half years were on remote due to COVID-19.

Since most of the players on the football team had graduated the previous two years whilst we were on remote I played varsity at my school playing at Full Safety for the year and we ended up going 6-2 overall. My coach told me something during that year that stuck with me which was he hadn’t coached a middle eastern player in his years coaching football. It stuck with me because I understand how much it means for most middle eastern parents that their child does well academically and that’s all they really care about. I can connect this to a previous reading we had “Mothers Tongue” By Amy Tan where she questions why there aren’t many Asian Americans in creative writing programs. I question why middle easterners don’t try out and give sports a chance. My Dad did play cricket once in a while with his friends but I was always into American sports such as Basketball and Football. Even when you look at the professional sports accusations such as the NFL and NBA you don’t really see many middle eastern players. I think that’s because of the culture of middle eastern parents.

They want you to have a stable job, make good money, buy a house, and have a family. I hope for my future generation that I introduce them to sports and get them active out there to pursue their dreams whether that’s in sports or outside of sports and something else. Before you’d never see Asian people at the gym either, I’m glad that the culture as a whole is changing, and when I go to the gym and see a diverse amount of people with everyone there that I talk to and also trying to better themselves. At my high school, my coach was proud of the work that I put in and he said that he hopes that the other middle eastern students begin to try out for football and put in the work. At my high school before I graduated I tried to encourage some of my friends that are also middle eastern to try out for the sports teams because they had an idea of doing it but didn’t know if they should because of their parents. Now one of them is a senior in high school and playing basketball for my high school, he’s told me that his parents now support him playing sports too.