Experience Case - Personal Essay

Life takes so many twists and turns that somehow web into each other to shape a wonderful bond of comings and goings. These incidents are supposed to make you wiser more experienced person. We are supposed to learn from our slip-ups making sure it doesn't happen again. Many people can actually recall the exact moment in which their life was permanently altered by either a good or bad experience. As I think back to the many moments my life has had one dreadful stands out above all the rest.

It was year 2000; I was 16 years old living with my parents and 2 out of 6 of my brothers in a house in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. Having so many male siblings and a father who was a N.Y. police officer resulted in me not really having a social life outside of high school, church, my family and the few friends I had living on my block. Matter of fact sometimes I thought that my father would just say no to anything I wanted to do just because he wanted me in the house. I was what people called "sheltered" which means the lack of wisdom and experience ("Sheltered," 1998). I was also told when I was young that Experience is the growth of good judgment, Good Judgment comes from learning from bad decisions and Bad decisions is what you don't have when you are sheltered. So, let's just say good judgment was something that took me some time to obtain.

One dull Saturday evening my best friend, Maya who I've known practically all my life, and I were hanging out at my house. Around 7- 8 p.m she received a phone call from another acquaintance about a party later on that night. She got all the information and had told Pierre, the person on the phone, that she would be there and that she would be bringing a friend. Now as you know I wasn't allowed to go to any party's period regardless of who was giving it outside of family. So, Maya suggested that I ask my parents to stay at her house for the night so we won't have to worry about sneaking out because her parents were a whole lot lenient than mines. To my surprise my father said yes to the sleep over, I packed and made my way over to my BFF's residence. While we got dressed she briefed me on all the details surrounding the bash, where it was, who was giving it and so on. For some reason nothing she said sat right with me to well, I was questioning the area and the guys who were giving it but I didn't object to going because I really wanted to party regardless of the situation.

We got to the party around 11 pm, like I figured it wasn't in a good area at all matter of fact it wasn't even a neighborhood it was a whole lot of boarded up houses and warehouses on the block. But of course none of this stopped us from going. We went in and there were about 20 people in their partying, drinking, dancing having a good time so we joined in on the festivities. About 2-3 hours went by and I found myself in the restroom the majority of the