Scholarship Prompt
A time in my life in which I have demonstrated leadership was when my mother started talking to things that were not there.  As far as I know, she has never been clinically diagnosed with anything, but you don’t need a clinical diagnosis for words to hurt and make you feel afraid. The threat of violence was never there, but I had to grow up very quickly to outrun the too tight hand squeezes and the slamming doors. I knew then that I was also tasked with protecting my little sister from my mother’s wrath; when she cried, I was there, when she was sad, I was there. I was by all accounts a little caretaker, all by the age of ten.  As I grew older, I was the middleman between utility companies and my mother’s halting English, the mediator between my sister’s rebellion and my father’s absence. Now at eighteen, my mother keeps hold of me as if I were her only life vest, not knowing that she alone has sent me out to sea. Â