My Favorite Mistake

   "Detention! Thirty days waiting placement in JJS custody!" This is what my judge decided on my court date. I wasn't expecting that. I was expecting to be done with his games. This is my favorite mistake. 

    After a year of going in circles, something finally changed but not in the way I was expecting. I was expecting things to finally get figured out and to finally get a plan worked out with the judge. Only he had other plans. With some resistance and fighting, I got locked up.

  I spent twenty-six days in detention. I wasn't just what was going to happen after detention, where I was going to go. All I knew was that I wasn't going home and it was going to be a while before I went home again. At the time I wasn't sure what I had done so wrong that I deserved to be locked up, but I know that I had made a mistake. In my eyes though, it wasn't bad enough to go to detention over.

  After detention I was placed in Orem. My life, in my eyes, became a living hell. I was ripped from my family that loves and supports me and placed with another family who I didn't know anything about. I was taken away from my home in a small town and forced to live a busy lifestyle of the city. I still have another three months before I have even a chance to go home.

  The reason this is my favorite mistake is because of the lesson I learned. Hope for the best but expect and prepare for the worst. I think that if I would have known that before, I wouldn't be where I am now. Though I do think I would still make the mistake that brought me here.nothing has changed there. I didn't learn to change my mistake, I just won't have the opportunity or the desire to make it again.

  I have also learned to not take what you have for granted because you never know when things will change or for how long. I've learned to appreciate the life that I'm living in. But the main lesson I've learned is still to "hope for the best, expect and prepare for the worst."