I’ve become more empathetic, patient, and attuned to the struggles of others because I’ve had to confront my issues, and I now see relationships as the foundation on which love, care, and human flourishing are made possible. And I do not know how someone can claim to be self-sufficient when they rely on others’ care and love. Today, I’m more willing to meet people where they are, to give grace, and to see strength in mutual support. This attitude has been a gift as a philosophy instructor in my graduate program at a university where many students hold various external and internal obstacles. 
At one point during my undergraduate years, I had to take a year off to focus on my mental health. It was a quiet, difficult decision. I wasn’t sure how it would affect my academic path or whether I would be able to return with the same momentum. But the response I received from some of my professors was steady and compassionate. The eldest professor told me, "Philosophy can wait. When you're better, you can come back to it." He also shared how his own experience with suffering had shaped the way he thought about ethics and social philosophy, not just as abstract fields but as deeply human ones. Later, I enrolled in an M.A. program in Long Beach, but once again, I had to step away for mental health reasons. At several points, I considered not returning to graduate school at all. Still, one of my professors in metaethics, whom I worked closely with, encouraged me to persevere and helped me evaluate whether to continue or change my career path. He reminded me that setbacks don’t erase potential, and that persistence, too, is invaluable if done for the right reasons. His belief in me and guidance helped carry me forward. Today, I am thriving in my current program in San Francisco, maintaining a 4.0 GPA and working on a thesis I care about. These experiences pulled me deeper into philosophy with a clearer purpose. 

I intend to become a doctoral student in philosophy so that I can become a philosophy professor. I desire a more empathic world, and I believe philosophy has a significant role. My experience with mental illness transformed my intellectual commitments, personal relationships, and my sense of what political and social philosophy ought to do. Living with mental illness led me face-to-face with the human condition: we are inherently vulnerable. This vulnerability is not an anomaly or a failure, but a structural feature of our lives. We are dependent on others, materially, emotionally, socially, epistemically, and morally. My encounter with dependence and vulnerability brought me to ‘relational equality’, a conception of justice that stretches beyond the distribution of goods or formal rights. Relational equality is concerned with the quality of the relationships in which individuals stand. It rejects hierarchical or dominating social relations and emphasizes mutual recognition, respect, and solidarity. It demands that we build institutions and social norms that allow people not only to survive, but to stand as equals in shared social life. In parallel, I’ve come to adopt a view of ‘relational autonomy’ (the idea that we become free agents through our relationships, not despite them) that resists the atomistic assumptions still prevalent in much of liberal thought. Instead of understanding autonomy as independence from others and self-sufficiency, relational autonomy recognizes that our capacity for self-determination and moral judgements is developed and exercised within a web of relationships and social conditions. Autonomy, on this view, requires freedom from interference and access to support (social, educational, emotional, economic) that make meaningful agency possible in the first place. This shift has been significant to me as someone who has, at times, lacked the internal resources that liberalism often takes for granted in its model of the self. Similarly, I no longer believe that justice can be captured by focusing on individual choice and formal equality alone. My intellectual project now centers on reconstructing liberalism. I’m particularly interested in how institutions can be restructured to reflect a deeper commitment to relational justice. For instance, the unpaid status of child care work is a structural injustice to parents, particularly mothers. I firmly believe that academic work, especially in my field, is a public service, and I hope my research will have a long-term impact on how we treat people, principally the vulnerable, including people with mental and physical disabilities.