Cleaning House

Cleaning house and moving on can be applied to just about anything in life. I have done this more than once in my twenty three years of life. Cleaning house does not have to be looked at in a negative light. Some people think of it as something you are forced to do that is both painful and negative. I would not be where I am to day if I had never made the choice to clean house and make changes and alterations in my life. You could say that from the day I was born I started by cleaning house. Being adopted, I did not make the choice my parents did but in a way we all knew that I needed to clean house and start a better life.

Many of the times in my life where I would consider that my family and I cleaned house were not necessarily my decision. I had something to do with it but my parents were ultimately the decision makers. The first time we made a significant change my parents moved us from South Brunswick to Princeton to start my father’s dental practice. Then it was my parents taking me out of public school and throwing me into private school. That was hard for me at the time but probably the best thing that they ever did for me.

Those examples are not really ME cleaning house they are more my parents doing so and me following. However I am no stranger to change because of this. Three things happened when I went to college that led to me coming back to New Jersey and leaving behind the life that I made for myself in another state. I went to up state New York for college and had an “academic scholarship” that the school gave me as long as I played baseball. I went up there and played ball for a year, joined a fraternity, and had a blast until reality started to set in. My grades started to slip the second year so I quit baseball to focus on my work. It was a small school so I knew everyone and everyone knew me. I couldn’t stay focused and was more concerned with what sorority we were partying with that night than any other work I might have had due. So I wasn’t doing as well as my parents wanted so they told me that they were going to stop paying fro school and that I should apply for independence from them so that I could get student loans. I tried to do that and it was a very long process that would have left me out of school for a few years. So I decided I would finish the semester I was in and then continue working up there and slowly pay for my tuition. During the rest of that semester was when I started to really realize that I needed a change.

That semester brought the first thing that really made me think about what I was doing. I met a girl there who was about to graduate and that would change my whole lifestyle. Next, my fraternity went unofficial because we got in trouble with the school and it was more like a gang then anything structured. I saw everything going down hill with my frat and my school work and started to realize that part of it was because I surrounded myself with downers and vultures that in no way benefited me. I made some great relationships in that fraternity but I knew I had to get out of there and figure out what I really wanted to do. Just as the semester was coming to an end we I got word that one of my best friends up there had been killed while working in Greece for Aramark Food Company. He got a hit by a car going 120 miles per hour and when I heard about it, it felt like that speeding car had hit me. That was it for me, I tried to stay up there and control everything but I couldn’t. I just had to get out of that situation and clean house.

So I did, I broke the relationship with my fraternity, with upstate New York, with the name I made for myself up there, and with about 90 percent of the people I had met up there. I came home and proposed a plan to my father to continue school under tight circumstances. He agreed and I moved out the same year I came home to live with my girlfriend that I had met up at school and for the past two years I have been doing well in school, I am happy with what my plans for life are, and I have support from all angles to do what I need to do. That chapter in my life really was something that I had to move on from. I don’t regret anything I did up there and I saw and learned a lot but I had to move on and I knew it.