I believe that you should live every day to the fullest and take advantage of everything that is put in front of you. If you do not, at the end of your life, you will not be satisfied. And that day may come sooner than you think. It is important that you never let an opportunity go to waste. The earliest memory I have of my relationship with drugs was in 6th grade when I smoked marijuana for the first time. Later that year, I got into my parents’ medicine cabinet and used their codeine. They caught me, and I got in trouble. I wish I had stopped there, but I did not. I picked up again in 8th grade, taking whatever pills I could find. Before I realized it, I was taking them every day, nodding out in the assistant principal's office. This pattern of behavior landed me in a psych unit at 13. Once I got out, nothing changed. I didn’t want to get clean. I was put on medication, the first of many. I ended up in rehab a month later. After 52 days, I was discharged and sent home. I learned that you could not rehabilitate someone who does not want to be rehabilitated. Freshman year was a blur. I went to the hospital again but never tried to get better. That was until the end of freshman year. For the first time in a while, things started to get better. I reconnected with old friends, started using fewer pills, and smoked more. This was until summer of ‘22. I went to a party, made some bad choices, and those friends stopped talking to me. At this point, I had no one. Over three days, I took an entire box of cough medicine. After this binge, I believed I was in hell. One day, after an argument with my parents, I made the decision to end it. I took around 350 Benadryl tablets. As I waited, something told me to tell my parents. I can still see their faces after I told them. We started driving to the hospital. I remember losing consciousness, my parents shaking me awake. The last thing I remember thinking was, “This is it. This is how I die.” I slowly woke up over the course of several days. I could not walk or use the bathroom. My parents told me I had stopped breathing and was given CPR. I was reborn that day. Once aware, they sent me to a psych ward one last time. I remember thinking, "I can't do this anymore." When I got out, I started working to better myself. I slipped up once with weed, but as of today, I am 484 days sober and couldn’t be happier. Currently, I work as a CNA and want to become a nurse in a psych unit because it’s a job I will love no matter how bad it gets. I am grateful for warm days, the smell of spring flowers, the bees, and the birds that wake me up. But I am also grateful for cloudy days, the cold, the days I fail tests, and the days I lose my AirPods because experiencing these things is an amazing gift. I am insanely lucky to still be here. Living every day as if it were my last is not hard to understand. I believe making every day the best it can be and being grateful for everything, good or bad, is the only way to live. This I believe.