Welcome to Gaia! ::

Life is a continuous struggle which we as living creatures endure every single day. There are countless decisions to make, innumerable lessons to be learned, and untold discoveries to conceive. My freshmen year of Woodrow Wilson High School could possibly be the greatest engagement of my entire young adult existence. It was my less than two-pound kitten who enlightened me that you should never give up no matter what the circumstances are. Without the guidance of my runty feline friend, I might not be here today.

Love is the utmost sinful pleasure in the universe; we crave this feeling like a menstrual woman in dire need of chocolate. I never thought that the deranged temptation of love would morph me into a desecrated corpse of blood and tears. Why would I want to take my own life because of someone who didn’t return my love? Looking at that first year of high school, I strike myself as a petty child. I was an absolute fool. How could one emotion overwhelm your body and whittle it away to nothing? The answer, provided by Comprehensive Psychological Services, was that I am clinically depressed and suffer from an anxiety disorder. Their solution was a prescription of ten milligrams of Prozac and weekly meetings with a therapist. My savior was a domestic short hair tabby adopted from the Portsmouth Humane Society.

Peering into a steel cage, I spotted a tiny mewing fuzz ball – this was not my cat, but his already adopted littermate. My fur ball savior had just been taken to PetSmart’s adoption center. Immediately, my mother drove me over to PetSmart where I saw the pint-sized kitten. Fifty dollars and a few forms later, I had my Leonardo. I felt blessed by the gods to now own this white furred cat with patches of blonde stripes. Finally, I could experience that unconditional love; Leo was like my child – a child with colitis (an inflammation of the colon). My parents were terrified that Leo was going to die because of how skinny he had become. They also dreaded that I might hurt myself over the loss of my newly adopted kitten. Against all the odds, and after four hundred dollars in vet bills and medicine, my baby pulled through. Even when Leonardo got under a pound he kept fighting for his life. My cat was determined to live – he was not going to give up his life without a challenge. This birthday present that was meant to cheer me up turned out to be the best medicine I could ever have.

Whether someone has flesh or fur, you can learn a lesson from them. Leo taught me the significance of life; his drive to exist unsheathed my ignorance. Now, Leo is a twelve-pound, thirteen-ounce moose with an addiction to cat n**. I am overjoyed to say that Leo and I are prospering in life. I am astonished how I went from being a soulless puppet to a thriving young woman. And it’s all thanks to my cat, Leonardo.

I highlighted the changes I made. Great essay, Ace. Your wording was just a bit funky there.

My changes and notes are in green.

And I've some general suggestions for you, based on my own experience and what the teachers nailed me on when I started writing xD

~There are a couple places where it looks like you went to a thesaurus - I dunno if that's what you did or not; that's just what it looks like to me. Based on that, I would suggest that you'd do well to work with both a thesaurus and a dictionary - make sure that the word that looks good in a thesaurus is really the one that fits the context and strength of feeling, too.

~Pick a tense and stick to it. If you change tense, make sure it's necessary, like in a flashback (past-tense), or reflection. I know in speech, we switch tense all the time because we're not being graded on it; in writing, it's tempting to type like we talk, but we need to go back and make sure all the tenses line up. There are instances where it's acceptable to switch tense in the middle of the sentence (like "I was so dumb then; these days, I know..."), but for the most part, they are accompanied by tense-words ("then" and "these days" in my example), and it's usually safer to make tense-switches between sentences.