I'm not exactly sure how many doctors' appointments I've attended, all of which have ended with the same, inconclusive outcome of "we don't know." I have been battling my body since sixth grade, facing chronic headaches, migraines, fatigue, and pain nearly every day of my life. My physical struggles are extremely disruptive to my academic and social progression. Since middle school, I have been forced to miss countless social, academic, and physical opportunities because of my physical limitations. Each day after school, I had to come home, take an ice pack out of the freezer, and lie still in bed for hours until my throbbing head and aching body subsided enough to complete my homework and household responsibilities for the night. I seldom had time for fun activities, which pushed me into an ongoing state of mild depression. By the end of sophomore year, I was forced to give up my ten-year passion for soccer because of my inability to attend practices regularly. Each day, I would fight to get through my classes. I would complete my work and rest my head on the desk nearly every day. My friends thought I was seeking attention. My teachers thought I was depressed. I was simply in an indescribable cycle of extreme pain. My struggles were invisible, so to most, they did not exist. My mother understood. Having dealt with chronic migraines since childhood, she could see the pain in my eyes each day when I came home from school and begged for a bottle of Advil. The heating pad. The ice pack. Anything that would provide some sense of temporary relief to the never-ending pain. I desperately wanted to stay in my classes in fear I would become isolated—and even more depressed—if I left and pursued courses at home. However, at the beginning of junior year, I realized I didn't have a choice. I left my classes at my high school and pursued asynchronous dual-enrollment courses at a local community college. It was the best decision I ever made. Over the past two years, I have finally had the time to focus on myself and my health after existing in an unhealthy, competitive, and unsupportive environment at my high school that exacerbated my physical health issues. I realized how much I neglected my body and personal needs for a grade I was told was more important than my health. I have excelled in my college courses. I am currently holding a 4.0 GPA and feel better, both physically and mentally. I still spend nearly half of each day in bed, but I am able to complete my work in the other half and also find time for activities that bring me joy. Oftentimes, I get frustrated with my body's limitations and feel "behind" when I compare myself to my peers. It is spring of senior year, and we are still chasing a diagnosis at Boston Children's Hospital. However, in the meantime, I have found an academic format that works for my body's limitations. While my "showing up" may look different from my peers, I now understand that different does not mean inferior. Taking asynchronous courses and following my own path has reminded me to focus on myself, my accomplishments, and the progress I have made in my own life. Like President Roosevelt said, "comparison is the thief of joy." I am proud of myself and how far I have come, both mentally and physically, since the start of high school, and I hope to continue my passion for learning in college.

I think I know why people hate math. Let me back up first, though. Right now, in this car with my dad, my brain is humming happily in pursuit of a “why.” Specifically, a process by which I could derive the binomial coefficient. In my previous lecture, my professor had derived a simplified version of the binomial coefficient formula—a formula that helps us to understand the power rule, one of the most famous calculus rules for derivation. Its elegant formula, f’(x) = nx^(n-1), can be proved in many ways. However, as our professor was explaining his derivation, I asked myself why he had skipped over a crucial portion of this binomial coefficient formula: the coefficients themselves. With respect to our proof, they were irrelevant. But they were of course relevant in other scenarios, so I thus determined that there must be a methodological way to calculate them… and off my pen went. I haven’t stumbled upon many people in my life that share my passion for math and numbers. In fact, most people that I speak to seem to have this deep, unexplained hatred for them instead. Mathematics is the tool by which we use to quantify our very existence, yet we show no kindness to it. We confine it to a rigid structure of sequential learning, and within it we teach that there exists only a right and a wrong. We praise the answer, yet we neglect the process. And this is precisely where the meaning of mathematics has become lost. When we begin to unfurl this rigid structure and instead study the methods to its madness—and the madness to its methods—something truly incredible happens. Suddenly, the worst subject has become the very subject that methodologically explains the world we live in. The way the trees grow that we watch change with the seasons. The way our economy functions and sustains itself. The reason why we love and bond over music. The way we can predict which days we can build a snowman in the winter. The way a car moves and the path of flight our local honeybees likely take and the time it takes for our favorite flowers to bloom in the spring. Unbeknownst to the majority, mathematics is an art anxiously waiting to be discovered by the human consciousness. I never really connected my love for art and math until I began to consciously think about it. But just like those moments where my brain begins to buzz extra loudly and the world works in slow motion as my pen flies across the page, art, too, is the way that humans attempt to slow time. I spent my childhood working through notebooks and journals and on canvases and with mediums to seek that feeling of happiness. Of productivity. Of bliss. What I never realized, however, is that the medium I wished to truly pursue was not paint, or yarn, or watercolors. It was numbers. I would bounce from acrylic paints to American Girl dolls to dress up costumes in pursuit of a normal hobby. But what I always returned to were the boxes of flashcards that sat in the lowest drawer of the shelf in the playroom. Flashcards with my mother in pre-k soon turned into algebra problems at the counter with my father, which eventually turned into derivative explorations with my Algebra II teacher, and now conjecture proofs with my professor. My partner, Mathematics, always presented a reward—a feeling, a rush of dopamine—that I had never truly been able to replicate elsewhere in my life. And as much as he is my guilty-pleasure of a hobby, he is also my coping mechanism. I don’t feel as if my brain truly fits anywhere. The summer after fourth grade, I moved away from my hometown and skipped fifth grade. I built meaningful relationships and found my place in my new home. And just as quickly as I had built my social life, it was ripped away. I returned to my old home freshman year of high school with the confused eyes of my previous grade looking up at me and the judgmental eyes of my new grade looking down. Since, I have lived a confusing and mentally exhausting double life between New York and Massachusetts, trying to maintain relationships from my middle school years while also attempting to remain present in my physical location. The limiting structure of my high school classes and even more limiting social experiences led me to pursue college courses junior year at a local community college, which has opened up the pathway for a better fitting home for my brain. In the past two years, I have been able to dedicate much more of my studies to the learning process versus the memorization process, and have build meaningful relationships with my fellow students. Most importantly, Mathematics and I have developed a pretty intimate relationship. Not a day goes by where I don’t think of him. Or do him, for that matter (we have spent many nights in bed together past midnight, candle lit, as he listened to the quiet, confused whispers of my voice). Occasionally, even, my mother will walk in and tell us to go to bed. “Why?” I groan, and hesitantly close my notebook and pull up the covers. I then think about him until I fall asleep, but oftentimes I end up dreaming about him too. It is the pen and paper and the language of mathematics that allows me to shut the rest of the world out and hone a craft. It is the notebook pages of the world of numbers that line the walls of my bedroom with elegant proofs. It is the internal beauty of fractals that fill my head—colorful swirls and a language indecipherable to even myself—and cover my imagination’s canvas. Similar to many art forms, pure mathematics does not typically have a practical use in everyday life. But when we look at the progression of mathematics in its entirety, once in a great while, a discovery made a hundred years ago—an idea that a seventy-year old man was deemed crazy for, an idea that he was told he wasted his entire life purpose on, even—will become the key to the next era of applied mathematics. The man has long been dead. His ideas are alive as ever. Like art, mathematics is the preservation of human discovery and creation. I am attending college by choice. I have a desire to dedicate my brain and my will to learn to the betterment of society. To me, a college campus is not just a place, but rather a concentrated institute of knowledge waiting to be acquired by the next generation. I want to attend my lectures to learn, not memorize. I want to study theory not just in hopes that I will make a difference, but because it is what truly makes me happy. Perhaps the best discoveries come not as a byproduct of purposeful action, but rather passion, and pursuit of a “why”. I sat in my Thursday class with my classwork on the left and my green calculus notebook on the right, feverishly calculating out numbers to establish a pattern. In my left ear I processed my professor’s calculus lecture, in my right ear the students talking in the hallway, in my left hand I performed my exploratory calculations, and in my right hand I switched between copying down lecture notes and writing down my calculator answers. The room buzzed and buzzed and my head grew louder and louder until all I could process were the tiny numbers on my phone screen and my messy handwriting on the paper and then… whoosh. A rush of excitement flooded my body, and I had to refrain myself from laughing out loud. I found it. The five pages of disordered calculation boiled down to one simple, elegant formula. And approximately three hours, five sheets of paper, and an abused phone calculator app later, I had arrived at my answer through the process of complex pattern recognition—which just so happened to be a variation of binomial coefficient, n choose k, a famous combinatorics equation that means, in other words, “the number of ways to choose k objects from a set of n objects.”