I’ve always been drawn to a life centered around others. I’ve never for one day imagined my future and thought of anything but what I could do for those around me. When I was younger, I looked up to this desire to help others as proof of my goodness. And when I got older, I realized this desire was proof that I’ve never believed I was good.​ I was about nine years old when I first realized I wasn’t the child my parents had wanted me to be. While my parents loved me just as deeply as they loved all my siblings before me, I was the only one of us so gravely wrong that it brought them back to church for the first time in over a decade. I don’t know if it was before then, shifting restlessly at night, wondering how far my parents’ love would reach if I were to truly be honest with them for the first time about who I was. Or if it was after then, walking into those church doors for the first time, knowing I was only there to be fixed, to be made good, to be made into a child a parent wouldn’t need to reach to love. Either way, somewhere along the line, I became very self-aware of the bad others saw in me. From strangers online, to strangers on the street, to strangers at my new school, to strangers in my church, and to what had become strangers in my own home. I was bad. Horrible. Confused. Disturbed. Perverted. Fundamentally broken. And it felt like the whole world could see. For a large part of my childhood, I never imagined a future, at least not seriously. I didn’t feel I deserved one, and if I did, one simply didn’t exist for someone like me. But I was aging anyways, and even though I often thought about putting a stop to that, it never panned out. So instead, I gained an insatiable urge to do good, as if one day my efforts would outweigh the bad the world saw in me and I would finally be deserving of the future thrown my way. To do this, I was to always be kind to everyone, to be patient, to be understanding, to be helpful, to dedicate my life to aiding others, and I was absolutely never to be selfish or put myself first as I was already inherently selfish every day just for existing as I was. And in the end, they would see that maybe I wasn’t so bad after all. That I was good. Being older now, I’ve come to realize nothing will ever be good enough for the kinds of people my parents are, or the kinds of people who attend churches like theirs, and that’s ok. I’ve met many other transgender people like myself since then, and their identities have never hindered me from seeing the good in them, even the ones who view themselves the way I do myself. I know it’ll be a while to undo the damage of the self-image I was raised to see, yet I’m still grateful for the experience. Though it overshadowed much of my youth, it’s taught me two important lessons. One, that I really do love living a life centered around others and balancing out the bad put onto the world by those who are unwilling to see others as they truly are. And secondly, that people are rarely what others make them out to be. It is by these two lessons that I will carve my future.

Since I was little, I’ve dreamed of a life centered around helping others. Helping others was my sense of direction in my otherwise bleak world. It is what got me up in the mornings following nights I fell asleep wishing I’d never wake up again. It is what got me through the days I spent counting down to my last. It is what allowed me to feel anything other than sadness, anger, and sorrow. When you help someone who’s fallen get back up, when you watch the light that had been dimmed return shining to their eyes, it makes you feel hopeful that maybe one day your light can return too. It’s a reminder to yourself that until the day you draw your last breath, the battle between the light and darkness inside you is never over. To me, nothing in this world compares to the feeling of helping another, to live vicariously through their returned happiness and joy you seldom see in yourself, and to rekindle the dying hope in your heart. Being a child who struggled immensely with mental health, the idea of helping others became my purpose in life, especially in my darkest moments, and I held onto that purpose as tightly as possible. It became a central aspect of who I am as it was the only reason I could rationalize back then being here despite all the pain that I had felt. As I got older and entered high school, my struggles turned swiftly from mental to physical. I had always wrestled with frequent head pains that I had come to know as migraines, but somewhere between my junior and senior year, my condition had suddenly worsened. What had once been an occasional annoyance had become a weight on my life dragging me down every day. Living with a permanent migraine, I could no longer do the things I loved, whether it was spending time with friends and family, playing with my pets, or just enjoying the simple joys of life. Pain had once again become my nearly every waking moment and had flipped my life back upside down. The fears I had during my childhood of a meaningless pain-riddled life had come rushing back to me. I had worked so hard throughout school getting the best grades, taking all the hard classes, keeping up a perfect attendance, staying at the top of my class, all for one day becoming the helper I dreamed of being. But now, I wasn’t sure how I would be able to do all the things I dreamed of doing when I could barely do more than sleep and cry my days away. I cannot imagine my life going any further than where I was then if it had not been for the doctors who stepped up when I needed it. While not every solution offered to me worked, just having someone there on my side with some sort of action plan gave me hope of one day returning back to the fleeting normality I once knew. I still have a long way to go regarding my health, both mentally and physically, but I will never give up pushing forward through it all. If there's anything I’ve learned from my pain is how sacred every moment truly is. I want to do what my doctors do, I want to make every moment count, not just for me but for all of the world’s patients living in pain themselves. I want to be the beacon of light in their otherwise bleak worlds.