Elise Vallotton 
November 13, 2024
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5 min read
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Kennedy Lane Berry College Award: $1,000 November 12, 2024 |
The Responsify team is excited to announce Kennedy Lane as the winner of The 2024 Empowering Others Scholarship for $1,000. Kennedy attends Berry College majoring in English and Creative Writing. Applicants had to explore empowerment, reflecting on what the word meant to them, and how their major could be used to empower others. Applications for the 2025 Empowering Others Scholarship are now open.
On a random day during my sophomore year of high school, I sat in my chemistry
classroom pleading with the tears inching their ways out of my eye to halt their marching, but
they pressed on anyway. I quickly and nonchalantly wiped them away so nobody in the class
could see I was crying. I had just failed a chemistry test and brought my grade down to a fifty-six
percent, and, in my head, that had landed me an officer position in the club for complete and total
idiots. I excused myself to the restroom, but I, instead, slipped into a random closet down the
hallway when no one was looking. This offered me the privacy I needed to think. But I could not
think. My mind went cloudy, and I began to cry full force. My breathing rate increased until I
was hyperventilating so fast that I could no longer stand. I fell to the floor, and my vision began
to go black around the edges. A beating manifested itself inside my head accompanied by a force
pushing down on my chest. I began to shake uncontrollably. This carried on for the next seven
minutes. By the time I calmed myself down, my class was over. I left the closet and returned to
the classroom to retrieve my things. When I entered the room, my teacher was packing up — my
class had been her last of the day. She asked me if I was alright, and I told her I was. She did not
press it further.
That day, I remolded my entire view of myself. The intelligent girl that I thought I was
had been destroyed. She was a lump of clay flung from the pottery wheel in frustration after not
working out the way I wanted. A new statue took her place. A worthless, idiodic, and useless
one. This new figure had been inching close for years, slowly shoving my “prodigy child”
identity aside. This day was just the catalyst for the complete domination of it.
My chemistry teacher contacted my parents after that day and offered to tutor me. My
parents, of course, signed me up immediately. My teacher spent countless hours laboring over
my studies, ensuring I understood everything as well as I could. During one of our tutoring
sessions I was especially troubled by my difficulty in comprehending the subject, and my teacher
could tell. She stopped me in the middle of struggling to answer a question and said something to
me that etched itself permanently into my brain. She asked me: “You know you’re not stupid,
right?” She told me that my struggle with chemistry did not equate to idiocy. I nodded yes, but,
in reality, I did not know. I was failing her class badly and not performing extraordinarily in
many of my other classes. I did not have a single person in my life I considered a friend, and I
was at such a low with my mental health that I spent most of my free time contemplating ways to
end my life. Her words — which I am not sure she ever thought twice about — saved my life. It
gave me the power I needed to push through one of the darkest times of my life and keep myself
alive. I passed her class with a C, and I never forgot the words she said to me.
Her words demonstrated to me the importance of empowering others. Had she not taken
the brief moment to give me that small boost of confidence, I may have taken my own life that
year. My teacher gave fifteen-year-old me, whose life was completely upside down, the power to
begin turning it upside right again. She impacted me in ways she could never have foreseen, and
I thank her endlessly for it. Empowering people — even if in a miniscule way — can have a
great impact.
I am now in my Freshman year of college and am about to declare my English and
creative writing major and communications minor — and I would like to mention that I currently
have an A in my science course. I hope to be able to hone my skills with words so that I can
effectively empower the people around me. I want to affect people with my writing. I want to do
for others what my chemistry teacher did for me. I know there are people in this world who are
experiencing exactly what I was when I was fifteen, and I want to change their lives. Lives need
to be saved, and I hope I can be the one to save them.
I strive everyday to write things that will leave people impacted. Even if I only help one
person, it will have been worth it. I remember everyday how horribly insufferable my sophomore
year of high school was, and I strive to prevent anyone else from experiencing it. When I see
someone struggling, I consider carefully how I can help them, and I do everything I can.
Empowering others is so important, and I experienced the incredible effects of it first-hand.
Everyone can acknowledge that empowering others is a great thing, but many people do
not realize the burning cruciality of it. It can lead to a person choosing life in a life or death
situation. Our words have great power and we should use them to show others their own
strength. We say things everyday that empower or hinder others. Even sometimes the simple
choice to not use our words at all can discourage others. Responding with silence when we see
someone struggling can be equally as detrimental to that person’s self-esteem as saying
something to take away their power — or at least take away their belief that they have power.
Words have an indescribable influence, and we must utilize it for good. Unfortunately, it is
common to not think twice about the words that come out of your mouth, but, even if you do not,
someone else might. That alone should be empowering to everyone.
