Rusty Ralston Writing Sampler for Prof. Anne Grey, January 2022

Rusty Ralston-Johnson 

ENGL1010 

01/19/2022 

Writing Sample 

The past few months of my life have been ridiculously hard for me, considering I have been dealing with so much from both the outside world and the inside of my own head. I am one who usually tends to let their emotions out of their chest a little too much. I have been known to be violent and or emotional to a point to where I was not respected in high school until I got into a fight with a Neo-Nazi and won. While life has been tough since March of 2020, when the COVID-19 Pandemic started to sweep the country for the first and far-far from last time, I have to say that my life has been in a pretty big rut since last October.  

In October of 2021, right at the start of Fall Break for Pellissippi, my mom fell ill with a stomach bug, and then all of a sudden, my mom had a stroke. While this was not surprising, she originally had a stroke back in March that didn’t do much, it was terrifying. Especially as this stroke had become a lot worse than the March stroke. The stroke affected her ability to talk, to walk, to eat, and basically necessitated her needing to be taken care of for possibly the rest of her life. While the months where she was in the hospital were quiet, especially since my dad had to be at the hospital with my mom, she would later have to come home with us, and she has been draining to work for the past few weeks. She can’t talk very much, and when I can’t understand her, she gets mad at me for not understanding her even though she can’t talk. She demands food, lots of food, drinks, screams at us to get the remote off the floor or move a blanket. She basically has us all on a leash, and the only way we can get some sleep is if she sleeps…which she doesn’t do because she often wakes up at night with random pains. I can’t sleep in because I’m usually the only one in the house and mom needs me to do everything for her while dad is away. 

This is especially the reason why the family has been losing sleep over the past few months. She has basically become our ball and chain, and one that needs to be fed or she’ll scream at you at the top of her lungs. I don’t know why my dad insists that we keep her, but maybe he is showing mercy to any nursing home who will take care of her. 

Now, another thing that is setting me back in the fact that, I tend to have a weird tendency to “stick” to certain things, and other things tend to weasel into my brain like a bug. This is an example of one of the latter. My brain is infected with a virus. Don’t worry, it’s not contagious, it won’t leave you in the hospital on a ventilator, you won’t need a mask for it, and you certainly will not find people eating horse medicine and bleach to try and cure it. It is a virus of the mind, and it comes in the form of a big, blue bird. This virus exclusively attacks the Hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls both love and lobito. Any sufferers of the virus will have an uncontrollable crush on a big, blue, eagle mascot, and the person attached to the mascot. This would be fine, except for the fact that the person behind the mascot is currently getting married. I do not know when I got infected with this virus, but it had to have happened when I was 19, when I knew the person in question personally. Cutting contact with the person seemed to have helped me at first, all I needed to do was to be a lot more social, as this virus spreads with isolation. So, naturally, right as I thought I was cured, COVID took over the world and I was suddenly screwed over by this virus, however I am recovering from this virus which shall not be named but it is German for a word I previously said and is also a brand of typewriter. So, hopefully I am free of this virus. Yes, I just wrote a long paragraph on my case of unrequited love, but I loved it so much I wanted to show it off. 

So, those are some of the things holding me back. While I didn’t touch over everything, like my messy organization and my social security struggles that have been put to rest, I hope this leaves you with a perspective on what obstacles I need to clear to be a better person to me.