Friends and family provide invaluable support system through tough times
By Kate Stanhope
June 7, 2009 9:06 p.m.
Kate Stanhope is four days away from graduating from UCLA. How did she do it?
A. She cheated and made nice with many male professors throughout her academic career.
B. She is extremely, inexplicably lucky.
C. She is really smart and/or spent most of the past four years in Powell Library.
D. It is written.
As the outgoing arts & entertainment editor, I only feel it’s appropriate to make a movie reference in one of my last contributions to the Daily Bruin. And just like Jamal Malik, the main character of “Slumdog Millionaire,” there is only one right answer to this question: It is written.
Four years ago in the spring of 2005, someone decided to take a chance on Katherine Amanda Stanhope with a 3.8 GPA (yes, you read that right), a passion for her Falcon Flyer high school newspaper and an after-school job as a cashier at Vons.
OK, maybe I’m a tad bit lucky.
Looking back to four years ago, I don’t know exactly what I would have done had I not been accepted to UCLA, but I’m sure I would have figured something out. However, looking back at the four years since, and the crazy ride that is officially my time as an undergraduate, I truly don’t know what I would have done without UCLA.
Though my freshman year was fairly average, my second year was the beginning of what I like to call “the test.”
First, my mother suffered a small stroke in January of 2007. Considering her young age and good health, I don’t think I had ever before been shaken so much to my core. Seeing my source of strength, my source of inspiration stuck in a hospital bed was a point in my life I can never, and will never, forget.
Just like the superwoman I know and love, my mother eventually made a full recovery ahead of schedule, just in time for me to get the second biggest shock of my life: love.
It may sound cheesy (actually, I know it’s cheesy) but it only hit me so hard because I truly didn’t want it or even think it possible. I was always the girl making the embarrassing jokes with the object of my affection rather than making the passes, and after 20 years of being boyfriendless, I figured it suited me well and moved on.
But then, boy met girl, boy and girl kissed and boy and girl were in girl’s first relationship two weeks later. Unfortunately, things ended as abruptly as they had started a few months later and the heartbreak crushed me, again, to my core.
A few months after that, a friend of mine passed away at the tender age of 21, and by the close of 2007, I was in a deep fog of anger, confusion and depression that, at the time, felt without end.
Waking up every day in this fog and having to go to class, go to the Daily Bruin and simply make it through the day was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.
However, now out of the fog and reflecting back on my time at UCLA, I feel lucky for everyone I’ve met, everything I’ve done and everything I’ve learned.
Through my mother, I learned how to be selfless and how to be depended on rather than dependent on others. Through my relationship, I learned how to be happy with who I am rather than insecure about who I’m not. Through my friend’s passing, I learned how to live in the moment and never take things for granted.
Above all, I learned that sometimes it is better to fall and learn to pick yourself up again rather than to never fall at all.
So in the end, even if these events were, in fact, not written, I truly would not have it any other way. And I’m forever grateful it was my friends here at UCLA and my Daily Bruin family that were here to catch me and help put me back together, better than I was before.
Stanhope was the 2008-2009 arts & entertainment editor, 2007-2008 assistant arts & entertainment editor and a member of the editorial board.
