Humans of Auburn

"I loved Miami. It’s like a different country down there, a different world, and we stuck out really bad because we were blonde haired and blue eyed with southern accents, but I loved it. We were so close to the beach and would go all the time.” “Why did you have to move?” “My dad’s a football coach, so we moved around a lot. He coached college and now he coaches high school to coach my little brothers. My parents, I think, did a really good job of just teaching us that this is just part of life. It taught us to be really independent and to have to do things on our own. We had to just go out there and make new friends. We didn't have our comfort zone because we would move every two or three years. We just had to go start new, but I feel like we’re so much more confident because of it. We're confident in just knowing that we can do this on our own, and we can just go start a new school or go to a new church.”

“When you’re underwater, you’re not thinking about anything else but breathing. It’s not scary, but you can only concentrate on that one thing. When I'm out and about I'm thinking about everything that I need to do, but when I’m scuba diving all I can think about is that one thing, and nothing else matters.”

“After I got to basic [training], I herniated one of my lower disks two weeks in, and didn’t even know it until five months later when I got into my station in Hawaii. They said they were sending me to physical therapy. Turns out, that made it worse. 'Now you have at least one herniated disks and degenerative disk disease, and we are sending you to do MRIs and X-rays. Oh guess what, now you have some deteriorated knees and sciatic nerve running down your left leg.' They put me out of the Army, but didn’t give me a medical discharge. After that, I was unemployed for a year and a half. I moved back here because my parents were moving back over here, and after a while I decided I would go to college since the V.A. is paying for it. That’s the only way I am able to go to college.”

“I am an Uber driver now to pay all my bills. I usually take him [my dog] with me. I drive college kids going to and from frat parties on the weekends, and I take people to the game who are from out of town. I dyed my hair orange because of Auburn and because of Uber. It makes it easier. If a bunch of people are getting picked up, and there are a bunch of cars, then they can just look for somebody with orange hair. Plus, I’ve always wanted to do something to my hair."

“I’m an active duty Marine and doing a commissioning program, so I’m finishing up my degree. I was enlisted for eight years, and now I’m getting my degree so I can be an officer. I want to climb the top five peaks in the United States and in Northern America. At the end of the year I am doing a charity event, and we’re gonna hike from here to Florida. It’s like 230 miles, and we are going to do that to raise money for gold star [military] families. I’d say that’s probably on my bucket list somewhere too.”

"My favorite author is probably Stephen King. It is the unexplained in normal settings. Like in 'Pet Sematary' most everybody grows up with a pet. Most everybody loses a pet and has to deal with that. But 'Pet Sematary' is a very different take on that. I've buried several, and it's heartbreaking. But I wouldn't want them to come back, not the way Church did."

"I wish I could've told my twin sister how much I loved her before she died. I wish I could've expressed that to her. I wish I could have told her how important she was in my life. She was kind of like my better... better half of our twinness. I wouldn't say the better half. I had my strengths and weaknesses, and she had hers. It kind of felt like we balanced each other out. We provided each other a lot of support and a lot of love. Shared a lot of the same passions and activities that we loved to do." "What was she like?" "She was weird. Just like me. Just different. She was tall, beautiful, funny, somewhat reserved in most places. But once you got to know her she was really wild and just really out there, really weird sense of humor. She loved to adventure, she loved to take risks. She was just trying to make the world a better place every chance she got. That's how I like to think about her. I think it's impossible to express how awesome she was to me or to anyone else."

“When I was here for my first year on campus, I had a bicycle accident and had to be rushed to the hospital in a helicopter. My parents drove six hours away to come see me and see if I was okay. That was probably the biggest thing that has happened to me at Auburn. It really showed me that my family cares about me and wants to see me succeed no matter what.”

“I think the main thing that I’ve learned, especially just because I got in the business school, is to just not be as shy. I feel like I have something valuable to offer people, and other people have something valuable to offer me. My big passion is music, and I really enjoy pretty much every aspect of it, especially the live aspect. I really like heavier music, like metal and rock. I feel like there’s a lot of honesty in those genres that is kind of hard to find in other genres. So yeah, there are a lot of bands that I look up to because they’re out there traveling 9 months out of the year. And they’re doing that just to share what they have with other people.”

Left: “The more I’ve grown in my identity in the Lord, the more that school kind of frees up from the stress and the pressure and I am able to enjoy class. I am able to, I don’t know, try to honor the Lord in going to class while in the end knowing I’m going to graduate from Auburn. And I may not do what my major is, but I’m confident that my time here is still for a purpose regardless of what specifics I plan to do. It's kind of like opening my hands and saying 'I don’t have a plan but I know that I’m in His plan.'”

Right: “My purpose here [at Auburn] is not for my job. A job is just a platform to get me into the spheres of life that the Lord wants me to be in and from there my purpose is a lot bigger than myself and my job and making money.”