What a fickle thing it is, when you’re six years old. Knees buried in dirt, haloed by patchy grass, I sat in the backyard the night my mom told me he died. My cousin by my side, the two swings swaying gently in our view. I felt nothing. Just the moon above us and pre-rehearsed hymns pouring from our lips. What a fickle thing it is, too young to understand. For years, I thought overdose meant cigarettes. I yelled at my mom when I found a pack in her purse. Later, I learned about oxycontin. Sweet memories of him — our creekside walks, cereal mornings — were punctured by the realities of his addiction. At seventeen, I discovered he didn’t die clean in a hospital, but alone, in a drug-ridden house. At twenty, that image then included a photo of me clutched in his hands. I couldn’t shake the notion that he had stolen half of me when he left. I now have existed in the world for longer than I knew him, and can only try to reconcile what I knew and experienced with the ugly underbelly of addiction. The kicker of it all – I could never grow to hate him for any of it. What a fickle thing it is. It redefines normalcy. After he died, school became my tether. Overachieving offered a fragile sense of control. Straight A’s, an honors diploma — anything to prove I could hold steady against the unpredictable. Education was my escape, a foundation. And my mom was the architect. What a fickle thing it is. I watched my mom cry at her dad’s funeral like a six year old. Are we ever old enough to understand it? Funny to be a veteran, my mom the pupil. After his death, she became a steady, unwavering force, quietly bearing the weight of two parents at once. In New Orleans, where decent public education was scarce, my mom, supported partly by Social Security benefits, worked relentless hours and sacrificed her retirement to send me to private school. She also introduced me to dance classes, giving my grief a funnel, a form. Through her sacrifices, she planted in me the seeds of artistry, resilience, and hope. Today, as a writer and director of films, my work revolves around the very themes she helped me survive: grief, addiction, resilience. My recent short films explore these realities with brutal honesty. Through filmmaking and movement, I’ve learned to transform grief into empathy, loss into connection. As I prepare for my senior thesis film — a story about confronting loss and memory in my hometown of New Orleans — I find myself honoring my mother’s support in every frame. She gave me the education, the freedom, and the resilience to tell these stories. Now, I aim to build upon her sacrifices by turning personal pain into communal healing. The scholarship would not only ease the financial strain that chronic illness and dwindling savings have placed on my mother in recent years, but it would allow me to complete secondary education and focus my time and energy on a project that isn’t just a requirement, but a tribute. To him. To her. To home. To resilience. Her support was instrumental because it caught me at the most fragile point of my life, when I could have slipped away. Instead, she anchored me. She gave me the chance not just to survive, but to imagine, to dream. If you really think about it, it’s not all that fickle. Grief, after all, is just love trying to find a place to go.