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Michael Oher

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Michael Oher
Obstacles Michael Oher Faced to Achieve his Dreams

In the novel, The Blind Side, a young boy named Michael Oher experiences many challenges that caused him to change throughout his life. He started off as a shy, uneducated boy and later grew into an inspiring role model who went through many obstacles to achieve his main goal of becoming a football player. The novel starts off by describing Michael as a homeless boy trying to survive his life, but the novel later progresses into him meeting new people and changing into a successful man who accomplished his goals. Michael had to overcome many obstacles in order to achieve his dreams. Obstacles he faced that helped lead to his success were homelessness, the ability to trust others, and his ambition to succeed. Ever since Michael was a little kid, he had to learn how to fend for himself. He grew up with seven siblings and a mother who was constantly drunk; so he matured at a very young age in order to survive. “It was just that sometimes she seemed to forget that she had children and that we needed her care, so she’d go off for a while and we kids would be left to take care of ourselves and one another” (Oher 20). In this quote, Michael’s mother would occasionally forget to care for her children every time she was drunk and this led to her children fending for themselves and learning how to survive independently. There were many people in his neighbourhood that ended up in gangs because they didn’t have the money or education to find real jobs. Therefore, Michael was determined that he did not want to end up on the streets, and so this was the start of the obstacles Michael had to face in order to succeed in life. However, due to the lack of child care received from his mother, child services had to separate his family and Michael was left living with many different foster families throughout his life. Since Michael grew up in a poor neighborhood, he believed the way his family lived was normal.

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