The Power of Family

Family has always been a huge value of mine, but in this day of age... you don't realize how important those people truly are.

Family has been a value that was instilled in me at an extremely young age. I'll be honest and say that I never truly believed the importance of family and having that support system until I got much older.

While this is never a story a person would want to hear, it is a story that defines me better than any other and shows how my family taught me values and ethics that made me the person I am today.

My mom has always ingrained in me a sense of hardwork and compassion, she believed it was 2 of the most important attributes to a person who had big dreams and a desire to live out their dreams. My mom came from a background where she had to work for what she had and albeit it was inspiring.

In 2018, my mom's health took a turn for the worst. I came home from a transformative national training camp for my sport with my head held high. I had accomplished some of the best athletic achievements to data and I thought nothing could bring me down, but it did. My mom sat me down on the couch and told something a daughter dreads - she had cancer.

It was hard to watch my mom and it felt difficult to try to process all of the pain that my mom felt. But, as a 17 year old, I thought that the best way to deal with the pain I had was to ignore my family completely and cut off all contact I had with them. My mom no longer looked like my mom, she was foreign to me and I didn't care to know about what was going on anymore, I was completely numb to the pain. Through this, my grades slipped and I was not performing well at swimming and rowing which were my main competitive sports at the time. People cut their hair to honor my mom and had pink highlights to signify the breast cancer she had, but I didn't care about it because at that moment, I felt that my mom no longer existed.

I became my mom's caretaker while my dad was gone, and it helped me reflect a lot on how I lost my compassion, empathy, hard work, and I was selfish every day where I refused to comfort my mom in her struggles. I had come to realize that all of the values that my mom had taught me were not in me anymore, I completely lost my sense of self and slipped into a state of darkness. I decided that I needed to prioritize my life and the morals I live by. Thus began my rediscovery phase of what makes me Madison.

I found new passions like fashion and art, I learned how to drive so I could get to school and practice overcoming my anxieties, and kept my grades up while trying to thrive at all of my competitive swim meets without my parents around to cheer me on. Most importantly, I fostered a relationship with my mom that was stronger than it had ever been. Doing a lot of this by myself made me more independent, but it also allowed me to think about how much family would truly mean to me.

Throughout my college career, I have had many ups and downs with relationships and my own mental health. But, I would never question the support system that my family has and for which I am extremely grateful. Hardships and resiliency have been a major learning curve for me as my mom says to me, "it's never about what knocks you down, it's about how you will keep going". It is a phrase that I wrote on a sticky note and stuck on every mirror I own, I have walked by for that for past 6 years of my life. I continue to work on my communication, my empathy, and my resiliency in dealing with the challenges that every day life brings us. But, without my mom I would have never discovered the power of those attributes and how important your family can be in rediscovering yourself.