The struggle to find identity is similar to having no identity at all. Brathwaite wrote that every Caribbean person holds a sort of plurality within them in being both assimilated to a foreign culture and retaining a connection to their heritage, finding belonging in both and neither, thus creating something new entirely. Something that struggled to be named. Growing up in a mixed family, my grandmother hailing from Trinidad and my biological grandfather Chinese, I felt that conflicted sense of belonging. Growing up multiracial was a precursor to the struggle of growing up genderqueer. No one label was ever quite wrong, but there was never one that could perfectly summarize the experiences of my identity. I was both a boy and a girl, while neither all at once. I felt like both everything and nothing, but there was never a word for existing both outside the binary and within it, at least, never one that I felt fit. Like my people of the Caribbean, I was creating a new reality. My journey to describe my culture was inhibited by my struggle to feel welcome in it. There's an unfortunate reality of Brown and Black spaces or communities being unaccommodating to this kind of multiplicity. I was always one to read, escaping my realities with book after book after book. It was one of the only places I felt seen or safe, but nothing ever felt like enough. Little resources I found ever reflected the realities of the struggle to be me, and I yearned for the chance to see myself on paper. It is one thing to be queer, it is another to be Brown, and then to be a queer Brown person is to not be seen at all. If no one had ever written it, did I even exist? If I could not find my experiences reflected elsewhere, then I would have to create it myself. Writing, to me, is its own kind of language, one we try to use to bridge the gap between our experiences and others. It hungered deep inside me, a desperation and passion for pulling my soul out of my chest and showing it for the whole world to see. There is nothing more human than the attempt to connect with others, and to be cut off from that is stifling. Writing gave me a way to understand a world that seemed to not want me in it. If reading was my way of hiding from the world, writing became my way of existing in it. When I began to show my art online and post my writings, I discovered friends and family who had been struggling just like me, ones who had found belonging in the things I had created. Ones who could not live within one identity. There were suddenly people in my life who could accept me and connect with me, encouraging me to write more about the experiences inherent to this kind of being. I was reaffirmed to the fact that voices like mine were worth hearing. The rise of representation for people like me, fictional and not, has been astounding to see. To have the next generation not live with the same kind of invisibility I felt for years is something I more than want to contribute to. My degrees will hopefully help bridge the gap between language and experience, to find balance in plurality. To give other kids a chance to resonate with the world around them. There is nothing I want more than to keep on writing and create a future where we are seen.

Growing up Blasian and Mexican, especially in the throes of rising anti-immigrant sentiment mixed with the violence against Asians during the pandemic era, was obviously not ideal. I watched BLM protests cause waves throughout the country while my Chinese blood was gaining scrutiny, and my hometown was still recovering from getting shot up for the crime of being brown only a year prior. The violence against all of my heritages was up on an international stage, and I was only twelve years old. The news coverage was important, but it scared me. I didn't know where to look. Then the news started platforming the people fighting. The people brave enough to get on that world stage and say, "These people are my blood. I will not abandon them, even if it is dangerous." The ones that demanded attention and disseminated information. Through those ideals, I have focused my efforts on learning every possible way to look out for my community. Online sources and the news interviewing people like me were important resources to start with. I began helping with work around the church and gathering donations from my own closet and friends' pantries, doing my best to create a place where people could feel safe. My mother and I carried toys to the youth shelter, made boxes of our out-grown clothes to donate whenever possible, joined community events. I called my friends out when needed, and accepted my own blind-spots when they were pointed out to me. The cruelty I had learned of the world was something I vowed to not let exist in me. This past year, the realities of that vow have become difficult. The news cycles have felt increasingly like we have been backsliding, and I have caught myself becoming lost in my angers at the world around me. The unfortunate truth is that there is no rest from activism, especially when brown, and that sometimes change requires constant fight for any ounce of justice. I felt overwhelmed by the sheer intensity of the corruption, one problem fixed only for a thousand more to show. I felt alone upon seeing so many voices celebrating the brutality against my brothers. Every new day I felt as though the rot was deeper than I had ever thought to imagine, that there was not possibly enough I could do to ever fight back. I started to feel like a coward in the face of it all. Sometimes I still find myself feeling hopeless. But in the news of people speaking out, waking up to and fighting against injustices in this country, I came to the conclusion that we must be able to see the problems to fight them. The love I have for my people needed to be bigger than any fear or shame inside of me. I decided to help organize a student protest, using my resources to spread the word about our demonstration, and our combined efforts lead to television coverage of our story. Not long after many similar demonstrations across the city, the city council voted against building a new detention center. This is why I plan to study journalism. Our efforts are multiplied when they become visible. My people, every one of them, all deserve a voice within this nation, and I plan to use my degree to give them one. I will focus on issues inside our community and uplift community-led plans on fixing them, because our knowledge and struggles deserve attention. I hope that if I'm given a chance to make that plan a reality, the world will change for the better.

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.