Autobiography Sample – Great Example for Your Own Writing

This paper is an example of how autobiography essay should be written. However, this autobiography sample cannot be used as your own, since it will obviously be plagiarism. We do, however, hope this paper will serve as a source of inspiration for you while writing your own story.

When I think back on my entire life, I cannot find the moment when it started. However, I do have a pretty vivid memory of this huge wave of fear coming towards me and whipping me of reality. I guess that if you have never had a panic attack (which means you are blessed by gods), you can never know and understand why people act as they do in such moments.

You can get an attack anywhere and at any time—at a party, walking down the street or shopping in a grocery store. It would come and hit you with this heavy feeling of dizziness and sickness. It’s somehow similar to being drunk, but in a bad way—you cannot concentrate, you don’t quite understand what’s going on, and you’re acting nearly 100% automatically. And the worst thing is the more you try to fight this feeling, the stronger it gets. The only way to make it vanish is to relax as much as possible. This is the only method that works for me, anyway.

I didn’t even know what it was until the age of 17 or so. The feeling of extreme anxiety coming from time to time, which obviously was a panic attack, made me superstitiously believe in all that mumbo jumbo about bad luck, gut feelings and so on. It’s interesting that I still believe in intuition, but in a different way. It used to be that I only believed that something bad was going to happen, so I needed to be even more cautious that day when I had had the feeling.

Many people in my life who know about the attacks (well, not so many, actually), somehow link them to the fact that I do extreme and highly dangerous sports, like rope jumping and sky diving. They say that this is my way to conquer my feelings. I completely disagree with that, since these are just two completely different things.

Something that “normal” people consider to be scary, like jumping with a parachute, might not ever make me feel sick or cause me to hover on the edge of panic. Of course, I feel afraid when I look down at houses which are the size of toys, but this feeling is nothing like a panic attack. However, something really ordinary and unnoticeable, like the sound of a car honk or hearing a word said by stranger might make me cringe and feel like I’m drowning.

When I first applied to the sky diving club, I couldn’t believe I was going to do this. Now that I have done surfing, diving, hiking, climbing and many other extreme and intense activities, I can say that a human is capable of everything. Perhaps, the hardest thing to break was not my fear, and not the opinion of others (though it can be quite demotivating at times), but the thought, “I’m never going to do this—this just wouldn’t work out.”

Now, when I look back, that period of my life seemed to be pretty packed with action, and that was when my life turned 180 degrees and went in the opposite direction. At that time I also picked up a yoga class, and it started to change my mindset slowly. Yoga also helped me to stay still and distance myself from my emotions at extreme situations, both in ordinary life and when I was doing sport.

The way I saw people also changed a lot. When I was younger, I used to be a kind of a negative thinker, someone who could be offended by a look or a smile, even if the person didn’t mean anything bad. I have realized that people tend to be a little bit too self-conscious of themselves, so even if you fail or do a stupid mistake, not many people will even notice. And those who do will give you two seconds or so of their thoughts.

When I got enrolled into the extreme sports club, I faced another problem. I thought that it was weird for a person with panic attacks to go for something so dangerous and edgy, since that looked like I was intentionally trying to hurt myself. My yoga classes and reading spiritual literature (not of a religious kind, but the literature that deals with your mindsets, psychological tricks and so on) helped me to realize that I felt guilty for being so bold and daring.

It is said that after such a realizations you will get a huge flashback, where you understand when and why you started thinking in such a way. I didn’t remember who told me to be weak and scared, or when I used this for. That feeling was gone, however, which was my ultimate goal.

I quit extreme sports after getting into a really dangerous situation, where I though that at best I would never be able to walk again. Everything went better than I thought, as I wasn’t injured badly, but I decided to stop risking my life. The only thing I feared is that my attacks would be back again. Like my friends, I linked overcoming the panic with the fact that I threw myself into danger. Maybe these two things were linked at the very beginning, but I was delighted to discover that the boundary between them had eventually disappeared.

And now, I’m applying to your extreme sports club, since I found out that my desire to do reckless things and to feel the rush of adrenaline didn’t vanish. I also love being a part of something bigger, a part of a community where everyone knows that feeling and knows why we are doing it. And now, when I know that it isn’t connected to the panic attacks and the desire to prove somebody that I’m capable of such things, I want to try it all again.

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