{text:bookmark-start} Paper on Individual Skills and Strengths {text:bookmark-end} To begin with, I was born into a home that was strictly and unapologetically Right-Wing Republican. My father, who I should just state here and now is my first and best love, my ultimate hero, and the person I try to emulate on a daily basis, is 100% pure born Swede, a protestant, or at least he was then; he has since converted to Catholicism, and he was also one of the wildest people on the planet, bar none. My mother, an extremely amenable lady, who I also love and adore completely, is descended from Spain, France, China and Portugal was born in Nicaragua, and came here when she was seven. She was a devout Catholic, an excellent wife and mother who catered to her husband first and always, and who raised us Catholic, my sister and brothers and I. So this is where I hail from, a strict catholic, republican upbringing, with a very macho father, and a mother who believed that a wife should take care of her husband’s every need above her own. My father was a very successful business man, and mother was a homemaker, who also happened to help my father run his business. He had worked hard to gain his success, and he tried very hard to instill that work ethic into his children. We lived in a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills, with a pool, a dog, and everything a family could want. I was a very fortunate child with an idyllic childhood. I had loving parents, siblings, good schooling if a bit strict, lots of clothes and toys, friends, and a large extended family around the globe. However, I could not help noticing that other people did not seem to be as well off as I was. One thing I will never forget is the first week or so of my first grade, there was a little girl named Joy, who had warts, a lot of them, and that all the other kids made fun of her, and that she would cry. I watched