I was accepted to Ball State University, attended my first Winter Jam, had a wonderful Valentine’s day, and started a young adults group with 2 of my best friends!

This post is a personal essay titled “Just Be.” I wrote this personal essay as a Creative Writing project. It was inspired by several spoken word poems. It’s about love, patience, forgiveness, kindness, breathing, learning, and acknowledgement. I hope you enjoy it, please leave comments below either adding onto this piece or just leaving your own opinion!

     This post is 20 different lessons that I’ve learned over my 20 years of life, hence the title of this post. A majority of these lessons were brought to my attention through hard situations. It was a rough road to lead up to these lessons, but now that I know them, I plan to share them with all that I can. Maybe by age 30, I’ll have learned 10 more to share with you all. I want to apologize for missing my preferred deadline for this post, I’ve received a lot more homework within these past few weeks than what had been normal and of course, homework comes before this blog.

I’ve had a thrill of a life and many goals ahead of me. Of course, my life has had its ups and  it’s downs, but I try to now focus on everything good throughout my life and keep a positive attitude. My life is currently stress-free, and I’m not saying that it will stay at way, but it’s definitely helped me to focus on the good things and finish my homework as quickly as I can. I’ve thought of and begun acting on a multitude of different goals for my life. Click the “read more” button to read about some of the interesting things I’ve gone through in my life from my past, my present, and my future!

On May 27th, 2017 I graduated from Burris Laboratory School. The graduation ceremony was held at the Ball State University Ball Gym in the evening. I had so many people who came to the ceremony to support my graduation and it made me feel so incredibly loved and happy. It gave me such a large boost of confidence which was highly needed because I gave a speech (You can view a video of my speech that my friend, Dakota Gaither, recorded  at tinyurl.com/GraduationSpeechVideo). The amazing people in my life that came to support me at my graduation ceremony was my parents, Asher, my maternal grandparents from Texas, the Wolfe Family, Matthew, Dakota, my great-aunt, great-grandma, great-uncle, and one of my cousins.

In my last blog post, I wrote about what FIRST Robotics is, I suggest that you read that post before continuing on with this one. There is so many different programs that form the FIRST community and in that blog post, I explain those different programs from my personal experience. The FIRST community heavily shaped who I am today. You can find that post here.

Hey everyone, for those of you who do not know, I have been dating Asher Cougill for 1 year and 7 months. That’s my longest relationship! Before then, my longest relationship was only somewhere around 10-11 months and no where near as happy. I actually was in a lot of toxic relationships before dating Asher and I am so glad that I am with such a sweet and nice guy now. Today is Asher’s 20th birthday, so I decided that this week’s blog post is about how Asher and I met and eventually started dating.

Hey everyone, my name is Ashley Martin! I am the creator of Aureate Marketing, a local marketing business on a mission to strengthen the marketing of businesses located in Muncie, Indiana. I recently graduated from Burris Laboratory School and am currently enrolled in Ivy Tech Community College’s ASAP program.