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Personal Narrative: How Salsa Music Changed My Life

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As beads of sweat poured down onto the dance floor, I glance up at my partner, wondering how I ended up in what used to be the most dangerous country in the world, swaying my hips to salsa music. As to how I ended up in Colombia, it goes back to Spanish class in middle school. Despite the fact, I barely knew grammar or vocabulary, my new Spanish teacher from Bogota made speaking only in the language a hard requirement. I struggled with basic assignments and fared even worse on tests. After our 4th quiz, I approached my teacher to figure out how I could succeed in her class. She merely jotted a note down and ushered me away from her desk; I peeled it open to find a list of Spanish songs scribbled down. I scoffed, wondering how this could ever turn my F into an A. I plugged my earbuds in with the first track, and as I closed my eyelids, the jazz of the trumpets and the beat of the timbales washed over my mind. Intrigued, I dove heart first into the world of salsa music. With each blast of the trumpet, I …show more content…

With each departure, my faith in life’s potential dimmed. My parents and other family members, meaning well, helped little in finding a path forward, urging me to work diligently through these painful times, referring to a Buddhist maxim of “not wasting time mourning.” Each funeral produced a toxic state of mind, as I was forced to conceal my emotions each time. As my grandmother lay in her casket, a repressed mountain of confusion and anger rushed out over me, stranding me in the wake of emotional destruction. As I searched for meaning, an outlet, or just a reason for the loss, my frustration grew rampant as every result pointed back to culture and family, two unreliable sources in my quest to understand my situation. I knew that death occurs within everyone’s lifetime, but I couldn’t accept just shunning loss as a solution. Frankly, I didn’t know who or what I had left in

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