I made my first original story when I was four years old, stranding my stuffed animals on the deserted cardboard islands of my living room carpet sea. I couldn't even read yet when I was forcing my sister to play out the dramatic endings, forcing her to play with dolls and rewrite scene after scene. In the classroom where my teacher would chastise me for my chicken-scratch lettering and doodling battles in the margins, I was always more focused on getting my vision to come across cleanly than fixing my mistakes. My mind has always wandered, to many adults' dismay. It was like an instinctual need for me. Something written in the fine print of my soul, in whatever outlet it came out in. Markers, pen, iMovie. It was the constant urge to empty out my ever-filling imagination, my brain swirling with each and every concept that passed by, latching onto any hint of a narrative that I could make out. It's like a deep pull in my chest that keeps dragging me back to making new languages, sketching out scenes, and studying each character I made with intensity, always revising. I was obsessed with my stories. I couldn't make friends and I didn't know how to play properly or what the other kids meant when they said nasty things to me. My parents worked often, and my sister was older. I was alone, but I had my books, my movies, and my journal full of ill-paced comics made by my shaky unskilled hands, and that was enough for me. Stories were a way to get away from everything. It was somewhere I could hide. Somewhere that had room for me. When I was nine, my aunt told me that I should publish a book I wrote. It was a joke. "Book" is a stretch, as it was more of a notebook I bought from Barnes & Nobles with a main character that was blatantly just a cooler super-powered version of me. Even so, it was the first time anyone had ever suggested that my ideas were worth reading. That my writing, as I would come to know it, meant anything but a silly way to distract myself. It went from a private indulgence to something that might be worth showing to the world. I pushed the doors to my imagination wider, and writing became everything to me. A way to show the intimate experience of how I view the world and the things I thought were worth exploring. To bridge the gaps between language and experience. I was a young teen when I published something online for the first time. So scared to see what others thought of what I had to say, of how I bared my soul. As I kept diving deeper into my writing, reflecting experiences in my characters that I had never thought to tell anybody, I realized I had become a bridge to every other lonely kid like me. Every brown child without a perspective, every neglected kid with no one to talk to. They found themselves in my stories. They found themselves in me. To me, writing is a language itself. It's a statement of who you are, your passions, your memories. Your ideas. And I speak to my audience through it. I learned to be brave enough to connect with the outside world, instead of hiding from it. I plan on continuing that journey in college by majoring in English and Creative Writing. I'm going to learn how to keep connecting.

My mother is a first generation American citizen, born here in the states. Both her parents were immigrants from Mexico, neither of whom spoke English. They lived off food stamps and moved often, trying to find a place where they belonged. My mother went to a local college, the first in her family to do so, working as a bartender at nights to fuel her dreams of something higher. We used to shower with water bottles, the water shutting on and off intermittently as child support checks went undelivered. She decided, all while supporting herself and two kids on the sole income of an elementary school teacher, to go back to school for her Master's degree. I often watched her stay up late at night in between piles of papers and her open laptop, trying to balance grading papers and submitting her own schoolwork. She was missing my childhood milestones to give us a better life, fighting against the systemic disadvantages that being brown in America gave us, and I was proud of her. Prejudice and poverty was engrained into my veins from birth. The mix of identities in my blood meant there was no escaping the generational trauma I was going to face, but she worked her hardest to protect me from it. She tried to connect me to the Black and Asian heritage from my father's side, even if he never did, to show me to be proud of who I am. She showed me to be proud of my skin. My mother told me to never wish to be anyone else, no matter the hardships. I did, of course, because she couldn't shield me from the other children at school as our rights became a presidential debate, or the news stations that recounted the shooting that took place in my city because a white man decided he didn't like Mexicans. But her courage and strength has never once failed to give me some of my own. I have never once met anyone who could persevere like my mother. She showed me that resilience is what mattered most. She taught me that through our hardships, we stayed strong and lifted others up through our strength. That is how we overcome all the hurdles put up against us. She taught me a passion for empathy and a commitment toward empowering the people around me. When I think of college, I think of my mother pursuing a higher education so that she can build a better world not only for her children, but for her students. I think of her fighting to provide for me and my sister so that we can live proudly. I think of her fighting to keep us connected to our roots. I think of the way she helped me find peace in my identity. I know there are more stories like ours out there. I aspire to use my education to share those stories. I'm pursuing creative writing and journalism, to shine a light on my people so our voices are heard. I want to highlight the man-made inequalities in our communities, as well as show others who look like me that they are not alone. My mother gave me the ability to pursue my dream and find my voice. I choose to use it to give back to our community. I will continue her fight to lift up others and use my education to expose racial injustices, as well as highlight Black and brown excellence for the world to see. College, for me, means representing my heritage with pride.

When I was younger, mental health was more of a threat than anything else. When my depression started to show its face in my preteen years, the thought of going to a doctor was used as a punishment. A therapist was for sick people, villains in our cartoons who shipped people off to gloomy asylums. A place where I'd end up mute and abused if I kept crying, per my daddy's words. It was hard being brown and ill, as Black and Mexican families like the ones my parents hailed from didn't discuss trauma or mental disorders that I might have inherited. Being hit as a child was a funny story and anything else was something you didn't mention. Then, when I was thirteen, my mom brought me to a book store for my birthday, where a huge section was dedicated to POC authors. Finding stories that showed me at all were rare. The topics those stories tackled made me feel seen and comforted, things I didn't know other people went through. Those books that I found, ones that showed brown kids struggling with their queerness and health, they made me feel less broken. They stopped me from making decisions I couldn't take back. I want to spend my education learning to write those books and show kids that the options are there, that taking care of themselves doesn't have to be scary or shameful. That they're not alone. Sometimes accessibility means showing someone that help exists at all.