Personal Narrative: I Am Tiara Maclin

I am Tiara Maclin. Throughout my high school career I have maintained a GPA of 3.89 and attended two schools, Covington High and Stratford Stem Magnet. College has been apriority of mine since primary school, but I did not discover my passion for psychology until my junior year of high school. Today it is my goal to graduate with a master’s degree in psychology before continuing on to become a licensed psychiatrist; after attaining my psychiatry license I plan to open my own practice for the abused and mentally ill.
High school has been a place full of growth challenge and perseverance. In my final year of secondary school I was enrolled in Algebra 1, my first high school credit class. Despite finding the class to be significantly difficult,
I was in the same predicament in science after taking Biology 1 as a freshman in place of the usual biology prep course. By the end of my freshman year I had a 4.0 GPA and two academic awards, the Legacy award and the Honors award. Academic accomplishments aside, music and other arts have also played a huge role in my adolescent life. There was not a single year in high school I spent without either singing or dancing. As a freshman I participated in both chorus and lmarching band, which were both full of enthralling competitions and group trips. I marched with the same band my junior year and sang again with the chorus as a senior, but for me sophomore holds a slightly different story. After being promoted to the tenth grade I took a summer vacation with my father that turned into a yearlong stay in Nashville, Tennessee. During my stay I attended Stratford High School, which was under renovation and working towards becoming a magnet academy. Academically the school’s English department was on the rise, and it took me far in my writing abilities as well as my love for the subject. As for my
As a single parent with two children, my mother has always worked hard and pushed me even harder. I know without asking that she has experienced countless struggles throughout her life. Being not only a teenage mother but also the mother of an autistic child takes unimaginable strength and sacrifice, yet despite every odd, she recently graduated with her master’s degree in business administration with a GPA of 3.9. It is her mind that intrigues me; her mental strength, patience and discipline push me to question how she processes her life’s events when her mind is already packed to her skull with information. My mother has accomplished things that others would find impossible in her situation because they lack her mentality. The mind is a unique and highly questionable place, so why aren’t more people willing to explore it? My brother was diagnosed with autism at age two. He had always been a happy child who loved to spend time with family, but in October of 2015 after his fourteenth birthday, he changed dramatically. He became increasingly antisocial until he ceased speaking altogether. After a month of vocal solitude, Trevion began to speak again but with his voice came violence. When his rage became too much to handle, my mother began to seek professional help, but there was no aid in sight. After several internal debates and trips to an autism facility located in