Personal Narrative: The Average Joe's Life

For me, I was just being the average Joe. I never noticed anything different from my world to the next, I never noticed the degree of my living compared to anyone else’s. I just knew my life was the life I lived. The average Joe life was me pretending the hole in my floor were merely quicksand that I had to be light on my feet to dodge. The ramen noodles we had for dinner were more just a filler, it was a five-star dish. The broken A/C was an adventure to the Sahara Desert and the old used cars were just a flashback to the past. This was my childhood, full of dreams and fantasies. But as everyone knows, you have to wake up at some point. For me, it was my brother contemplating suicide. It was around my end of my sophomore year is when it all went down and it really shook me to my core. I had been living my life a dream, never noticing the pain and struggles all around me. And at that point, I realized I lacked the ability to understand others pain and struggles. Because I had lived a plastic life, I never truly learned to have empathy. This key component of a human’s life was missing in the average Joe and this turned my world upside down. In a short few months, my eyes were being opened. I looked around and I begin to notice the struggles in my own life. I began to look all around the world, to see the extreme poverty, the wars, and overall sickness of my new world. I saw reality for what it was, no longer was I constrained by my imagination and personal happiness, I was forced to bite the bullet. The first day of Junior year, I wrote this statement about myself:
In many situations, it has been hard for me to feel empathy for people who are hurting. It's hard for me to understand things that I have never had to go through. Even to the extent of my own brother. I couldn't understand his pain, and it has troubled me for a long