Learn to Have a Voice

I believe that having a voice in something that you invest in, whether it involves time or money, will build you into a stronger person. All my life, I have grown as the one to be taken advantage of, only because I was the one willing to help everyone else other than myself.

Until, my junior year in high school, I grew tired of the same routine daily, and wanted to be given a challenge, rather the same routine daily. At the beginning of my junior year, I was selected to be drum major for the high school band. A drum major is the leader of the marching band during rehearsals and in performance. Their job is to follow the band director’s instructions and get the agenda done. Though, it had been one of my goals as an incoming freshman, I did not know how to take on the actual job the first time, I was a shy kid. I looked up YouTube videos on drum majors, looked at how the band director acted, though I couldn’t do it.

One day, the marching band was on the second week of rehearsing the field marching for football games, and no one had memorized their music. Through the frustration on how average the music was to move to, I lost my temper and then opened my mouth, saying how unacceptable it was to not know the music if we were ranked in first place the two consecutive years prior as the best marching band in our conference. Once I had finished giving the speech on how we should focus better, all jaws were dropped, even I was surprised, it was the first time I had opened my mouth about something that I cared about. I had lost some friendships, because I got tired of being taken advantage of, but grew even stronger relationships with people who wanted to follow in my footsteps and be a leader rather than a follower in life.

Though I invested a lot of time rather than money in my last two years of high school to make my band better than the year prior, I became to be known as the most confident in any situation. The one to defend a person being bullied, the one to volunteer to go first, the one to sacrifice in any situation to help another with influence. I learned to have a voice by being chosen to lead the marching band and became a stronger person through losing and making new connections to influence those younger me to become a better person than they were yesterday.