I had grown up slow in New Orleans with my parents and twin brother in a small house near the lake. I was shy, but had a strong group of friends that had been with me since the beginning. Life was school, sleepovers, and synagogue; Pretty average for an eighth grader.

 

I was at a friend’s house when we got the news that a hurricane was coming. Hurricane days used to be like snow days to some. A short vacation where the parents worry and the kids play in the dirty water that would rise up to the levee. Sometime’s we even got to spend ten hours in the car for what should have been a three hour car ride just to get to northern Louisiana. This hurricane was different.

 

We headed north to stay at my grandparents. This three-hour car ride took eighteen hours and we almost ran out of gas on the interstate. We watched and waited for the okay to return home but the news kept telling us we couldn’t. I hopefully stared at the old desktop at my grandfathers in hopes of hearing from a friend or get an image of the damage in our neighborhood. Nothing. Not until my parents sat my brother and I down and told us we were moving to Texas and starting school there. Whatever fear I was feeling then could never have amounted to the worry my parents felt.

 

After a year in Texas we finally were able to rebuild our house. We were one of the lucky ones with only minor flooding and major looting. I started my first day of high school with a boat in the courtyard that had floated there over the storm. I only had one friend back from the group of friends I had, and those friends are still scattered around the United States. There was once grocery store in the city, and the heat from the sun pounded on you without a tree in sight for shade. Looking back, the situation was absurd, we lived in a ghost town, but to we all had accepted it all as normality.

 

Hurricane Katrina made me realize that I could flourish in the face of adversity. Although I had never been to the Northwest something about Oregon just felt right. I was ready for my next adventure. My mom was a fashion editor, which inspired me to pursue the journalism school at Oregon. After a few classes I found advertising. It was everything I could have wanted for someone equally left-brained as right: Creative and organized, quirky yet strategic. I hope to be a media planner or account planner working between the creative’s and the clients, but one thing I’ve learned is that life can throw a lot at you and you have to be flexible in order to succeed.