Thank you for reading in on a small biography about me. My full name is Dermot Milos Lonergan.
I am a Thompson Rivers University student in my fourth year of schooling. I am taking a Bachelor of Journalism, with a minor in Business Law.
Being born on a small Island (Pender Island), I grew up around 2000 other calm, peaceful and respectful people. I spent my high school years taking a water taxi to Salt Spring Island, where I attended Gulf Island Secondary School, where I became a devoted basketball player. Although I do not play anymore on a team, and I only play in scrimmages with other experienced players, I gained the skills of patience and natural motivation. Coming from a small island with not much opportunity to expand my social circle or venture into trying new things, I had found myself learning more and more skills by myself through the sport.
The two skills Basketball taught me:
Patience and Natural Motivation: Basketball on a small island was niche; many kids who were there did not play basketball, or even any sports at all. This meant if I wanted to find opportunity for myself, I would have to venture out to the mainland (Surrey/Langley/North Vancouver), and join club teams to stack up against new talent. I was never the physically gifted type of player when I was younger. Adding on that, my understanding for basketball philosophy and intelligence in game was very little. This lead to me playing against players who were way better than me in both categories. At the time, this came off as discouraging and embarrassing; young athletes around me got to wake up at 11:00 AM and go to practice for an hour or two, then head home. Whereas for me, I would either skip a day of school to take the 7:00AM boat, drive out with my caring and understanding mother to go to practice, then either get home on the 10:00PM ferry if I was in Surrey/Langley, or take a float plane from North Vancouver to Salt Spring Island the next morning to make it to school on time.
This whole process that lasted years was tiring and disheartening; the opportunities athletes around me felt like they were handed to them whenever they felt like it. Whereas I had to go the extra 9 yards for any sort of opportunity. Now that I can look back on this whole learning process, I had ingrained patience into myself by not quitting through all the late nights of travel and tiredness. With the natural motivation to train myself on Pender Island, I now see that it was a privilege to have less opportunity. These setbacks taught me to hold myself accountable, and has been a skillset that is not only forged into the way I go about schooling, but setbacks in life as well.
When it comes to expressing creative vision and a skill that I was naturally more gifted in, writing is the singular passion that stands out to me. From my early days of middle school, I would write essays for the annual Remembrance Day competition while everyone else would draw pictures (I would always get first place in my school because I would be the only one writing). In sixth grade, my essay went further than the Gulf Island school district in competition, which was very meaningful to me at that young age. Since then, writing has became a way for me to learn various ways to express myself with my own style, even through academic essays in University
The meaning behind writing for me:
Creativity and Style: Growing up enjoying writing is something I see myself taking advantage of sometimes. The opportunities to use words to express the way I want to communicate is a skill that for awhile I had glossed over; almost like I knew I could do it at an adequate level, so I did not need to expand on it. The deeper I had gotten into school, I realized that there was levels to it, just like basketball. It is a tool that needs to constantly be sharpened to make progress. The sharper the knife is, the better it can cut; I would be able to express myself in ways that I did not necessarily know how to with sentence structure. With academic writing, I at first found it relatively boring. The more I was able to write university essays in different formats, I would start to picture myself speaking the sentences I was saying.
This, creatively, was my style of constructing writing for someone else to read. The mental note that someone was going to read the writing I do was always in the back of my head, so being that, I wanted it to stand out. This is a strength that keeps progressing for me now thanks to university. I do see myself doing writing at a more serious level then university one day, as it has been one of the only things I have consciously seen myself picking up at more ease. But schooling has taught me to not let that ease take over – rather let it be a tool I use to concentrate and practice more in every opportunity.