I have coloboma affecting my optic nerve, choroid, retina, and iris in both eyes, and I'm legally blind. I grew up in a small school in west Texas that didn't have many resources built for a student like me. What I did have was a mother who showed up and advocated when the system didn't know how, and teachers who were willing to figure it out alongside her: separate materials, extra time, regular check-ins, and, just as important, encouragement to speak up for myself instead of waiting for someone else to notice what I needed. That combination, more than any formal accommodation plan, is what got me through. The scale of that gap didn't fully register until after my first year of college, when I spoke on a panel at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (TSBVI). The other panelists had come through urban schools, and listening to them describe their experiences, I realized how different mine had been. I saw my VI teacher maybe once a semester, for an hour or two at most. They had a range of special education resources available to them and interacted with specialists weekly. I chose a small university for undergrad on purpose, knowing a large campus would mean navigating unfamiliar buildings and systems mostly on my own, with less room for anyone to notice if I was struggling. Now, in graduate school pursuing a degree in art therapy and counseling, I've chosen a distance program for similar reasons: it lets me build a learning environment around what actually works for me instead of forcing myself into one that wasn't designed with someone like me in mind. Getting to this point took longer than it should have, not because of my vision itself but because of what I let myself believe about it. For years, I wanted to pursue art therapy, but I talked myself out of it before I ever tried. I remember thinking, who would want an art therapist who can't see very well? I let that question stand in for a decision I hadn't actually made. Eventually I realized I was placing a limit on myself before anyone else got the chance to, and decided that no one ever got where they wanted to be by not trying. That change in mindset is part of what I want to carry into this work: helping people separate what they're capable of from what they've been told, or have told themselves, they're capable of. Independence, to me, isn't about doing everything unassisted. It's about having the same range of choices everyone else gets to consider. For a long time, that wasn't true for me. Career paths got narrowed before I even reached them, not by my disability but by assumptions about what someone with my disability could do. Pursuing this degree is one of the ways I've reclaimed that full range of choice. I'm no longer settling for a path that seemed safely accessible, I'm building toward the one I actually want. I intend to use this education to become an art therapist who works with clients navigating their own versions of that same narrowing, whether it comes from disability, mental illness, or circumstance. I understand in a very real way what it feels like to be underestimated before you've had the chance to prove otherwise, and I want that understanding to shape how I show up for the people I'll eventually work with.

I spent several years at RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver coordinating REACH, a program that used art-making to reach people experiencing homelessness, many of them also living with untreated mental illness and addiction. I watched people build something steady with their hands, a collage, a painting, a small object they could point to and say "I made that," in the middle of lives that felt anything but steady. What struck me wasn't just that the art helped. It was how often it became the only place someone felt like a whole person instead of a diagnosis or a case file. That gap, between the clinical language systems use to describe people and the way people actually experience their own suffering, is what pulled me toward art therapy. I'm now pursuing an MA in Art Therapy and Counseling at Southwestern College, and I think about Brian's story in exactly those terms. A system that treats mental illness and addiction as separate problems, to be handled by separate providers on separate timelines, will keep failing people whose lives don't sort themselves so neatly. Nearly half of people with severe mental illness also face addiction, and yet care is still so often built around single diagnoses and single doors in. The people I worked with at REACH lived that failure daily: turned away from one program because they were using, turned away from another because their mental health symptoms were "too complex," bounced between systems that never talked to each other while the actual person in front of them kept falling through. What I want to bring to this field is not a new technique so much as a different starting point: treat the whole person, and treat what they make with their hands as real information, not an add-on to "real" treatment. Art doesn't ask someone to explain themselves in the language of a system that has often already failed them. It gives people a way to externalize what's happening internally, grief, shame, confusion, without needing the vocabulary a clinical intake form demands. I've seen this work with people who had been talked at by dozens of providers and had stopped expecting to be understood. Something shifts when the first ask isn't "tell me what's wrong" but "make something." My vision for making a difference is specific rather than abstract. I want to work directly with people navigating co-occurring mental illness and substance use, in the kind of low-barrier, relationship-first setting that REACH modeled for me, where showing up matters more than showing up ready, and where art-making is treated as legitimate clinical work rather than a nice extra. Brian's story is a reminder of what's at stake when that kind of care doesn't exist yet in enough places. I'm pursuing this degree because I believe it can exist in more places, and I want to be one of the people building it.

This fall, I am beginning a Master’s in Art Therapy and Counseling at Southwestern College. It is the first step toward something I have been building in my imagination for years, a practice that I hope will eventually grow into something larger than a traditional therapy office. What I want to build is a space, and I mean that both literally and philosophically. My long-term vision is an art therapy practice that also functions as a communal studio open to the broader community. One of the things that draws me to this model is that art therapy remains largely unknown to the people who might benefit from it most. Many people have never been exposed to it, have no idea what it entails, and would never seek it out simply because they don’t know it exists. A community studio changes that by creating a low-barrier entry point where someone can come to make things, find their footing, and discover what art can do for them before they ever sit down for a formal session. The vision has two parts. The first is a traditional therapy practice — one-on-one sessions where art becomes a tool for processing grief, navigating recovery, or working through major life transitions. The second is a communal studio space where people can come to create independently or as part of structured support groups. I imagine dedicated studio sessions for different groups such as people in recovery or for those navigating grief, groups of people who share a common experience and might find something powerful in making art together, even without speaking directly about what they’re carrying. This matters to me because I have seen what happens when people are given a space to create and be witnessed. During my time at RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver, I worked with REACH, a program serving artists experiencing homelessness. What I observed there was that art did more than allow for creative self expression, it restored their sense of identity and belonging. It reminded them that they had something worth saying. I want to build a space that does that for people who are struggling but who might never walk through the door of a traditional therapy office. I also believe strongly in empowering people to explore their own creativity outside of guided sessions. One of the most important things art has given me in my own life is a sense of agency; the understanding that I can make something out of difficult experiences rather than just endure them. I want the people I work with to leave with that too. Not just insights from therapy, but a relationship with their own creative practice that they can return to on their own terms. The kind of space I want to build is one where creativity is treated as essential rather than optional, where art therapy is accessible to people who didn’t know they needed it, and where the act of making something together becomes its own form of healing.

Making art has always felt like my default setting. Since I was old enough to be trusted with washable markers, I have been searching for ways to express my creativity. Growing up legally blind, art was never just an activity, it was a way of making sense of what I was seeing, imagining what I couldn’t, and helping other people understand me. My vision was confusing to others, but through my art, I could show them. That relationship between making and meaning has been with me my entire life. It just took time for me to understand that it could be with others too. The first time I truly understood art as a therapeutic tool was during a family weekend at the rehabilitation center where my mother was receiving treatment for alcoholism. It was an especially difficult time. My mother had always been the core of my support system, and watching her struggle was its own kind of grief. During the weekend, a therapist asked us to draw a happy memory of our family. I chose Thanksgiving. As I drew, small details began to surface: the smell of candied yams, my brothers talking over each other, the squeak of the antique dinner table. I realized for the first time that art could do more than express. It could excavate. Through drawing, I was able to begin acknowledging emotions I couldn’t yet put into words, and to start making sense of relationships that had changed in ways I didn’t fully understand. That experience planted a seed. After college, I took a position as an Art Education Coordinator at RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver, supporting REACH, a program offering artists experiencing homelessness a space to create and pursue artistic opportunities. What I witnessed there deepened everything I had begun to understand at the rehabilitation center. I watched people who had felt invisible to their community step into an exhibition hall and see their work on the wall, their name on a label, their perspective treated as worthy of attention. Art wasn’t just helping them express themselves. It was restoring their sense of identity and belonging. But REACH also showed me the limits of what I could offer. Artists would sometimes share experiences of trauma, loss, or addiction, and although I could listen with care, I often felt the weight of not knowing how to respond in ways that were truly supportive. I could hold space, but I didn’t yet have the tools to do it well. That awareness has never left me. It clarified that while connection comes naturally to me, ethical and effective therapeutic work requires structure, theory, and supervision, and that I wanted to develop those tools. My long-term goal is to become a licensed art therapist working with adults navigating recovery, grief, and significant life transitions. I am drawn to this population because I have witnessed the ripple effects of addiction within my own family, and I have seen firsthand how art can reach people in moments when language falls short. I want to build a practice where people feel genuinely seen—perhaps for the first time in a long time—and where the act of making something becomes a doorway into understanding themselves and their relationships more deeply. Art gave me that. I want to spend my career giving it to others.

Several years ago, I worked as an Art Education Coordinator at RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver, where I supported REACH, a program offering artists experiencing homelessness a space to create and pursue artistic opportunities. Prior to working with this population, I took human connection for granted, but these amazing artists gave me a new perspective. The artists I worked with at REACH had talent and vision coming out of their ears. What many of them had lost though, was community, people who saw them as whole, complex human beings rather than a problem to be managed or ignored. When we gave them a space to make work and share it, something shifted. Not just in the art, but in the people making it. I watched individuals who had been invisible to their community step into an exhibition hall and see their work on the wall, their name on a label, their perspective treated as worthy of attention. Connection, I realized, is not just a feeling. It is something that can be created, tended to, and even restored if someone has lost it. We tend to think of homelessness as a housing crisis, and it absolutely is. However, it is also leads to a connection crisis, and I think that distinction matters, because the connection crisis extends far beyond those without housing. In a world where technology has made it possible to reach more people in a single lifetime than at any other point in human history, many of us are lonelier than ever. We have more ways to communicate and fewer genuine exchanges. We curate our lives for an audience of hundreds while the people next door remain strangers. We have mistaken visibility for belonging. Many of us are, in our own way, socially homeless—physically sheltered but lacking the kind of rooted, reciprocal community that makes a life feel meaningful. I don’t think technology is the villain in this story, but I do think we have become passive about connection in a way that has real consequences for our wellbeing. Authentic human connection now requires intentionality. It requires the effort of showing up in shared spaces, being willing to be seen, and engaging with perspectives that are different from our own. It requires, in short, exactly what art has always asked of us. Artistic expression is not a luxury or a leisure activity. It is one of the oldest and most essential forms of human communication we have. Long before we had the infrastructure for the internet or the vocabulary for mental health, we were pressing images into cave walls and carving scenes into pottery, leaving evidence that we were here and that we wanted to be understood. Art allows us to externalize what is interior, to give form to what we might not yet have language for. When our creations are received with genuine attention, we feel less alone in what we are carrying. Art creates community not by erasing difference, but by making difference legible and showing us that someone else’s worldview, however foreign, contains something we recognize. It is one of the most powerful tools we have for reminding each other of our shared humanity. This belief is what has guided me toward a Master’s in Art Therapy and Counseling at Southwestern College, where my goal is to become a licensed art therapist. If art is one of our most powerful tools for human connection, then creating intentional spaces for people to make and share it feels like some of the most important work I can imagine doing. In a world where so many people feel unseen and unheard, I want to build spaces where expression is encouraged, where showing up honestly is treated as the courageous act that it is, and where connection can be rebuilt from the inside out. The artists at REACH taught me that, and I am still learning from them.

For a long time, I didn’t have names for the things I carried. When my mother relapsed shortly after completing a rehabilitation program, the anger was easy to identify. What was harder to name was the grief underneath it—for her, for my family, for the version of normal I had to accept would never return. I couldn’t articulate any of it, so I didn’t. I just kept showing up to my life, going through the motions, and quietly shutting down. My mother had a history that made it easy to believe her body was simply failing her again. Before I was born, she survived a large brain tumor that required three surgeries, one of which caused a stroke. The recovery had been long and hard, and its effects on her body can still be seen today. So when her health began to deteriorate years later, the possibility that she was suffering from new physical ailments didn’t seem far-fetched. She had an MRI to search for a new tumor. Her liver was failing (she was briefly on the transplant list). All of the medical professionals my dad had insisted she see had taken her at her word that she didn’t have substance abuse issues. It wasn’t until a neurologist who was himself a recovering alcoholic examined her that someone finally recognized the physical symptoms for what they were. Several things contributed to how long it took. She was a white, well-educated woman who knew her way around the medical system (not the image most people picture when they think of addiction). She had a complex and well-documented health history that gave doctors legitimate reason to keep investigating physical causes. And maybe most importantly, substance abuse can disguise itself so well in so many different ways that even trained medical professionals can miss it. It took someone with lived experience to see what everyone else had missed. I think about that often in the context of the work I want to do. Years later, I found myself in a parallel situation, unable to recognize my own struggle because I didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. The grief I never processed eventually surfaced as anxiety, but it didn’t announce itself the way I expected. There were no panic attacks, no dramatic moments of visible distress. Instead, I spent entire nights sick, nauseous, and unable to keep food down. It went on long enough that I assumed something was physically wrong with me. I saw multiple doctors. I had multiple tests. It wasn’t until a GI specialist suggested anxiety might be the cause that I even considered it. I had dismissed the possibility for years because the symptoms never matched what anxiety looks like in movies or on television. That experience taught me something I always make a point to remind myself: we don’t always know what struggling looks like, because we have all been conditioned to keep it hidden. We perform positive mental health for the world, even for the people closest to us, and that silence leaves us all less able to identify and name what we’re going through—and therefore, less able to seek help. My family and I hadn’t recognized my mother’s struggle for what it was in the beginning. Then, years later, I didn’t recognize my own. The circumstances were different, but the outcome was the same: years passed before anyone named it because we aren’t shown what it looks like. This is part of why I believe art has a unique role to play in destigmatizing mental health. When language feels dangerous or insufficient, art offers another way in. It allows people to express what they can’t yet say out loud, to externalize something internal before they have the words to name it. It creates a kind of shared recognition; you see something in a piece of work that resonates with you and suddenly feel less alone in what you’ve been carrying. And because art doesn’t require you to state anything directly, it can bypass the shame and self-consciousness that so often keep people silent. You don’t have to announce that you are struggling. You just have to make something, or look at something, and let it speak first. I am currently pursuing a Master’s in Art Therapy and Counseling at Southwestern College, and my goal is to become a licensed art therapist working with adults navigating grief, recovery, and major life transitions. The throughline of my own life has been silence. The silence of not knowing what struggle looks like, of not having language for what I was carrying, of living in a culture that teaches us to perform wellness even when we are falling apart. I know what it costs to stay silent, and I know what it took to stop. I want to build a practice that makes it easier for people to stop sooner, one where art offers a way in before the words are ready, and where showing up honestly is treated as the courageous act that it is. I have lived on both sides of that silence, and I know which side I want to be on.

Substance abuse doesn’t just impact the person struggling with addiction. It shapes the space around them. My mother was my earliest and most constant source of support. She homeschooled me, taught me to love learning, and— as the parent of a child with significant visual impairments—she advocated fiercely for me in spaces that weren’t always sure what to do with me. More than that, she taught me to advocate for myself. Growing up legally blind comes with its own set of challenges, and she made sure I faced them with confidence rather than apology. When I applied to college, I wrote my admissions essay about her, about how much she had already overcome and how deeply I admired her. She was my hero. By the time I got to college, she was slipping away. Her alcoholism had progressed to the point that we didn’t fully understand what was happening. Her health was deteriorating, but she hid the extent of her drinking so completely that we feared she was dying of some undiagnosed illness. When the truth became clear, the relief of finally having an answer was tangled up with betrayal. She’d been keeping something enormous from me, and I was left to navigate adulthood, including the particular challenges that came with my disability, without the guide who had always been there. What followed was a long and disorienting grief. My mother is still in my life, but long-term alcohol abuse changes a person cognitively, emotionally, and physically. The version of her I grew up with is not coming back, and I had to learn to accept that even as she still stood in front of me. Ambiguous grief is strange and isolating. There is no funeral, no clear moment of loss to point to. You just slowly realize that you are mourning someone who is still alive yet absent in crucial ways. That experience changed the trajectory of my life in ways I am still understanding. It sent me into a period of depression I didn’t fully recognize at the time. It taught me what it means to love someone through a version of themselves you didn’t choose and didn’t expect. It also brought me, quite literally, into a room where art therapy was being practiced: a family weekend at my mother’s rehabilitation center, where a therapist asked us to draw a happy memory. That exercise was the first time I understood that art could do more than express, it could excavate. I want to work with people navigating recovery and the grief that surrounds it, not just those in recovery themselves, but the people who love them and have had to rebuild their understanding of that love. I know what it is to forgive someone for something they may not fully be able to help, and to find a way to stay present for a relationship that looks nothing like what you expected. That knowledge is not easy to come by, and I do not take it lightly. I am currently pursuing a Master’s in Art Therapy and Counseling at Southwestern College, where my long-term goal is to become a licensed art therapist working specifically with adults navigating addiction, recovery, and the collateral grief that ripples outward from both.

Being legally blind has shaped the way I move through the world in ways that are difficult to fully separate from who I am. I was born with coloboma of the optic nerve, along with coloboma of the choroid and retina, bilateral microphthalmia, nystagmus, and esotropia. Navigating a world not designed with my vision in mind from the very beginning taught me early that perception is relative. Everyone is working from an incomplete picture, and making meaning out of what you can see and what you can't requires patience, creativity, and a willingness to sit with uncertainty. My acuity is intact, but I can only see things clearly when they are very close to my eyes. I read and draw about two inches from the page or screen. I use a monocular at performances to see what others take in effortlessly from across a room. Moving between light and dark takes longer for me than it does for most people, and too much time in bright sun leaves my eyes exhausted. Menus, street signs, and other text that most people absorb in passing require a different kind of effort from me. These constant limitations have shaped how I observe and take in the world around me. I have always had to look more carefully, get closer, take my time. I think that has made me a more deliberate observer of images, of people, and of the small details that others sometimes walk right past. My relationship to the disabled community has never been entirely straightforward. Growing up in a small town, there was no one else quite like me: disabled enough to attend events at the school for the blind, but able to be fully included in general education classes alongside my peers. At school for the blind events, I often felt that my disability was minor compared to what other students were navigating. Among my classmates at school, I was the one who couldn't drive, couldn't read the board from a distance, couldn't just glance at a menu. I have spent much of my life in that in-between space, not quite belonging fully to either world. Growing up, art became one of my primary ways of bridging that gap. It helped me understand what I was seeing, imagine what I couldn't, and communicate what words sometimes couldn't carry. In many ways, my visual impairment is part of why I came to art and why I'm now drawn to art therapy. That same orientation—careful attention, interpretive openness, comfort with ambiguity—is what I hope to bring into therapeutic work. That experience of occupying an in-between space has given me something I think is genuinely useful: an understanding of what it feels like to be difficult to place, to not fit neatly into the categories other people reach for. Many of the people I hope to work with, including those navigating recovery, grief, or major life transitions, know that feeling well. I don't think you have to share someone's exact experience to understand the shape of it, and that in-between space I've inhabited most of my life has made me more attuned to the people who live there too. I want to offer that kind of space to the people I work with.