Countless times I’ve insisted, “I’m a listener, whatever you want to talk about, I’ll listen.” This is in part because I really am a person who enjoys listening to my friends talk about things they care about, but also because just being willing to listen to someone can mean a lot. I remember sitting at a local cafe with my friend for hours, listening to her talk about books she had read recently. I remember a stressful moment filled with rambling and an apology that I quickly refuted. I remember hanging back at school in my friend’s car as she explained the gut-wrenching play she had cried over. I remember late nights with a bright screen, talking about anything we could think of, desperately fighting off the loneliness. I remember conversations held at a whisper in the dark, stories too large for the quiet room. Sometimes, listening is all you can do. Sometimes, listening is enough. When I was younger, I didn’t feel like I had anyone who would listen to me. I didn’t have many close friends, and certainly none I was close enough to share my insecurities with. If I can make a difference to my friends and be the one who listens to them, whether it’s about a personal issue or a passionate interest, they might feel less alone. I don’t want anyone to feel like they are without support, especially at an age where we are all making life-altering choices that weigh heavily on us. Recently, a friend approached me to say I’ve become their “person.” I knew that he had, for a long time, been the person to go to to talk about difficult things in his friend group, but he didn’t feel like he had anyone he could go to. He told me that he’s started to come to me first when he needs to talk about something. It feels incredible that I can be that person, a reliable friend who can listen. I have the chance, the privilege, to be a part of his support system, and to make a difference, just by listening. It is a pressure on me, but a welcome pressure if it means that my friends feel more safe and secure to be themselves. In the past few years, there has been a trend away from letting people be themselves. Social media causes us to scrutinize every move we make because it might be preserved forever. Any moment we aren’t perfect is a moment we leave ourselves vulnerable to the harsh judgment of our peers. Blatant rudeness has emerged from this cultural shift, expressed in attempts to quiet any voices that stand out. In current times, the very least we can do to make everyone feel welcome is listen. Above all else, my motivation to listen comes from this normalized hatred. I can combat it one day at a time by taking that extra time to lend my ear to someone who has things to say. A friend I met a couple of months ago has a niche interest and no one to discuss it with. It’s the type of nerdy interest that is commonly laughed at and ridiculed, and she had struggled to even bring it up to me for fear that I would make fun of her. I immediately told her I would keep up with it, learn about it, and talk to her about it. Many of our conversations revolve around that interest, but I don’t mind. Being that safe place for her to express herself and enjoy what she loves is the most important thing to me, and I do hope she knows how much I care that she is happy. What I do isn’t something incredible. I think, at least, that it’s basic kindness. In a world where even that is becoming rarer, it’s all I can do to continue reaching out and being a person to lean on. My only hope is that I can, throughout my life, remain a source of kindness to anyone who needs it.

For as long as I can remember, fear has been with me. It has followed me closely throughout my life, sometimes warping into a new form, but always there. It overwhelmed me, keeping me from doing things I enjoyed or having new experiences. Small worries turned into mental roadblocks, and irrational terrors kept me from doing simple activities without a racing heart or sweaty palms.  An anxious mind mixed with academic pressure caused me to push myself too hard more than a few times. The stress of keeping up with everyone’s expectations for me and my own expectations weighed heavy on my shoulders, a burden I didn’t know how to carry. Yet, I kept gathering more weight, agreeing to more responsibilities than I knew what to do with.  It wasn’t just stressful, it was terrifying. I knew that if I dropped any pieces of my juggling act, someone would be disappointed in me. To my mind, that was a worse fate than working myself to the bone. I would rather shove my way through long nights, early mornings, meals eaten while furiously trying to finish assignments, and breakdowns in the bathroom, than tell someone, “No, I’m too busy!” There isn't an easy way to recover from the burnout that this pressure leaves you with. In many ways, I don’t think I’m free of the damage. I still have a sense of dread that follows me around, the nagging voice in the back of my mind that someone, everyone, is going to be disappointed. I still find myself going to school exhausted from working, ready to finish my day before it’s started. In time, though, I have carved myself a balance, found the threshold of my abilities, and learned to refuse pressures I know are too great to add to the collection.  Prioritizing my health over expectations was first a battle with my fears. I had to remind myself, time after time, that declining a task was fine. I wasn’t going to become the most hated person at my school for deciding I was too busy to attend a club meeting or turning in an assignment that wasn’t “perfect”. My family wouldn’t stop talking to me because I didn’t join an honor society or my test didn’t have the top grade. It was fine to say no.  One of the biggest shocks as I regained free time and hobbies was how much I had neglected my friendships. Close friends I had spoken to daily less than two years ago seemed barely like acquaintances anymore. My best friend from freshman year had all but given up on getting me to respond to their messages. Bringing people I care deeply about back into my life and putting the time and effort into our relationships that were missing before has made me so much happier. I have things to talk about that aren’t school-related, I laugh more than I have in a long time, and I enjoy everything again. What a privilege it is, to be able to enjoy things again.  Of course, my anxiety has never really left, and, more than likely, it never will. I care deeply about my academic life, but I know how to manage the fearful part of me now. Expectations don’t always match reality, and that’s okay.

There wasn't a specific moment when I realized I wanted to be an artist—it was a culmination of years of encouragement and engagement. Watching cartoons with my siblings in the early mornings of the summer, seeing the newest movie in the theater in the evenings, and joining the art club at school, I grew enamored with artistic expression. I started making art seriously in high school, dedicating weeks, months to pieces I truly cared about. I got to choose what I made, and it could be interpreted in an infinite amount of different ways. Inspired by the work of other artists, I wanted to be a source of drive to someone else as well. I didn’t immediately realize I wanted to be an animator either. As a kid, I was entranced by movement. I spent hours staring at the swaying of tree branches, the flight patterns of birds, the bustle of crowds, and people in restaurants. I made stop-motion movies, carving out intricate stories with dozens of characters, and my siblings helped direct and script each scene. We proudly presented our projects to anyone who would listen, and I am still shocked that we could build such complex worlds from so little. I try to bring a feeling of movement to all of my artwork now, still or animated. In the past few years, my desire to be an animator has only strengthened, but my hope for the profession has waivered. With the development of advanced generative AI, artists are tossed aside in favor of soulless machines that work for free. I hated feeling helpless, knowing that a computer program was worth more than my hours of labor, the love I poured into each stroke of a pencil. I have regained my hope, though. Despite the tendency of large studios to dabble in AI, animators are holding their ground. Some ground-breaking, jaw-dropping creations have come out in this time of uncertainty, which motivates me most—discovering new, innovative ways to bring art to life in the face of industry despair. I want to take this wave of avant-garde animation, the mixture of multiple techniques and styles, and build on it myself. I want to bring stories with complex characters to the forefront, characters that people can see themselves in, and that make us question our lives and society. I want to make something that lives with someone. A creation that doesn’t just stand on its own, but breathes life back into the world, inspires people to pick up a paintbrush and start to tell their stories. I won’t live forever, nor will anyone else. How we decide to sculpt ourselves is all that will be left. More than anything else, I want to make a difference and represent through art those who feel like they don’t have a voice. I want others to know that they can create too, they can bring their work to the spotlight and tell the story they hunger for most.

I was fishing, as usual. My friends would fight for mining and building, while my sister settled for hunting most of the time. I resigned myself to fishing, knowing it was what I would enjoy doing the most anyway. I was introduced to Minecraft by my best friends on their Xbox One, where we played my sister, my friend, and her sister, and me. At the start of a new world, we would divvy up tasks, one person taking each job. I typically would end up with fishing, as no one else found it very interesting. I liked fishing so much because it didn't require me to focus intently on what I was doing; I could joke and laugh with my friends without worrying about the creepers and skeletons, just the ocean in front of me and the fish that would bite every so often. The social, storytelling ability of the game has always been my favorite part of playing and consuming content related to Minecraft. I had very few friends growing up, as I moved states in elementary school, but I connected deeply with the ones I have now through Minecraft. The stories we could create and how we worked together to build a world we were all proud of fueled our imaginations and brought us together to collaborate on buildings, adventures, and goals. I'm a storyteller at heart, and Minecraft has been an outlet for my storytelling for a long time. In those worlds I built with friends, I would think of what we would leave behind when we eventually lost interest in the world and moved on to a new one. I wondered what people would think if they were to come across our builds in their solitary worlds and if they would come up with a story themselves of life in the empty landscape stretching for hundreds of thousands of blocks in every direction. I added small details - signs, monuments, and personality - to everything we built to tell the story of each world. I came up with other reasons for each thing we did - we built the watchtower to look out for the danger of raids on the horizon, the dock into the icy lake was the remnants of a fishing town before we came when the world was warmer and the lake still thawed in the spring. Each pet received a marker with their name when they died, and each area was customized to fit the narrative I was developing in my head. I put care and thought into every detail I attached to our worlds, and I know my friends did the same. All of our Xbox saves, the hundreds of them with just our initials or a silly joke to name the world, have parts of us scattered throughout them: a patchwork quilt of the ways we perceived our experiences within the game, and how we interacted with each other as it developed. Now, we're older. When we visit each other (because my family moved once again), we play less Minecraft than we used to. The old Xbox One can barely handle Minecraft, let alone four people playing at once. But, without fail, we end up making a new world. The first thing one of us says is always "Building, mining, hunting, or fishing?"