I have a complicated relationship with the word "legacy". The impression that my ancestors have left on this world is something I've always tried to escape from. I come from a long line of abusers and addicts, men who have raped their daughters and beat their sons. Obviously, coming from this lineage, I want to do nothing but escape it and rise above. My mother and father are not abusive. They have never laid a hand on me. But they have been abused, and they want nothing more than for me to be protected from that. Unfortunately, they chose the wrong way to do so. Instead of raising a daughter who is in touch with her emotions, who is aware when a behavior is abusive and uses her words to protect herself, they wanted to raise a daughter who would never feel the pain they felt. So I was taught to never show my emotions. They stopped holding me at the age of two. Whenever I cried in front of them, my mother in particular would tell me to knock it off or "I'll give you something to cry about". She was raped by her own father-- of course she wouldn't want me to show weakness. Unfortunately for them, I've always been sensitive and empathetic. When I saw a bird on the beach with a broken leg when I was nine, I didn't stop crying for days. I was so sure that it was going to die, even after we had called the local nature preserve. Whenever one of my friends showed up to school hungry, I would always give them half of whatever was in my thermos, even if that meant I had less. My parents saw this as weakness. They reminded me gently at first and harsher later on that this would be my downfall, that someone would take advantage of me and hurt me. These lessons started to work-- albeit a bit too well. I attempted suicide on my thirteenth birthday. When my parents found my note, they panicked. They had almost lost their daughter, their pride and joy. They didn't know what to do, so they sent me to my pediatrician, who in turn recommended me to a therapist, Heather. Heather was patient, kind and understanding. She was okay with me crying during my appointments, telling her my deepest fears and secrets, and showing emotions that weren't happiness, anger and the cold I was expected to show in place of sadness and fear. I started to learn that vulnerability was not the weakness I was taught it was. My parents were eventually called into a session with Heather. I was told to leave the room. After an hour of screaming and fighting, my parents came out with an assignment-- to get therapists of their own. Vulnerability is a strength of mine, I know that now. Vulnerability is relatability, empathy and love. It can get you hurt, very hurt, but it heals twenty times more than it wounds. With help from my therapist, I've broken a decades-long cycle. I plan to teach my children that vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness, unlike my parents taught me.

There's a scene in the Netflix original show "BoJack Horseman" where the titular character encounters alcohol for the first time since he got sober. The vodka in question is in a plastic water bottle, and as it swills around in the bottle, the vodka looks like a night full of stars-- a cosmos trapped in something so inconsequential as a water bottle. While my addiction is not to alcohol, every time I lay my eyes on mine, it seems to sparkle and shine. I'm drawn to it like a moth to flame, and even when I'm not actively taking part in it, I can't help but touch the cardstock paper Connecticut lottery tickets are made of. I can't help searching for a sign, any sign that the one I'm about to rip off is a winner and that one day, I'll win and get the hell out of my hometown. I bought my first lottery ticket two days after I turned 18. I remember walking to the gas station around the corner from my high school. I had eight quarters in my pocket, and I vividly remember being excited. I had just turned eighteen, after all, and I was about to make a grown-up purchase. I was initiating myself into womanhood. I remember scratching my two one dollar scratch offs before track practice, with my younger friends eagerly watching me. I won one dollar off of those scratch tickets, and my friends and I ran around screeching like monkeys-- you would have thought I had won a million dollars. The sheer amount of dopamine in my system had me shaking. That dopamine rush caused me to buy a ticket here and there-- never more than a dollar-- but it didn't get too serious until a summer later. In May of 2022, I took a summer job working at a gas station. I was to ring people out, fix the gas pumps if there was a leak, and sell lottery tickets. It had been a while since I had bought one-- I go to college out of state-- and I was immediately entranced. I was introduced to an old man named Greg who shared my enthusiasm. Greg was a man in his seventies that would come in, blow about two or three hundred on scratch tickets and win about five hundred a day. Employees spoke about the time he had won a quarter of a million dollars before. I was convinced if that he could win like that, so could I. The tickets I bought went from one dollar, to two, to five and then ten. I blew about two hundred dollars on tickets in a month. I was only stopped when my Californian boyfriend noticed that I had sold a plane ticket that I had bought to come visit him to buy more tickets. He told my parents, as a good boyfriend would. I was furious. Of course I was. I needed that fix. I didn't care that I was losing. I needed a dopamine fix so strong I would shake. But my parents cut up my debit card, alerted my therapist and I was stopped. I began to see how much I was hurting myself and my relationships. My boyfriend was devastated that I had chosen a quick rush over him. My bank account had less than a hundred dollars in it after working six hour days for two months. But I began to heal. I still am, and that's all I can hope for-- healing.

Pretty autumns and racism. That's what Litchfield County, Connecticut is famous for. Famous for people of color moving into school districts and out of them a year later, famous for side-eyeing teenagers with brown skin as they browse stores and order at restaurants, famous for hiding their kids away from anyone with a skin tone darker than their own. I was born in Litchfield County a little over nineteen years ago, and for the first eighteen and a half years of my life, lived there. I remember girls and boys running away from me on the playground because my lips were big, my eyes were dark brown and my skin was tanned, even in the deepest depths of winter. I remember my history teacher telling my class about Magellan, and everyone looking at me like I would eat them. I remember people using me as a defense, saying "I'm not being racist, I'm friends with Bethany!". At first I used to let these things slide, thinking that it wasn't worth it to get mad over something that only I was being affected by. But as I got older, I started to stand up for myself. Suddenly, not only was I the colored girl, but I was the colored girl who would make a stink out of "nothing". Finally, I went to college. I made sure to go to a college far, far away. I expected things to drastically change, for all my friends to be Filipino, for the racism to finally stop. It got better. I wasn't getting glares in the hallway or offhand comments about my skin or face or hair, but it didn't go away entirely. It was hard to find Filipino friends, and I'm still struggling to find some. The Filipino-American community has and still is a far off dream for me, a bastion of hope that I'm not sure I'll ever reach. But my family is a microcosm of that community, so I'll start with them. I'm lucky to have been born into a family that is college educated, and I plan to give the resources to do so to my kids. They will be Filipino, so to raise and educate new members of an ever-growing community would be an honor.

1. I deserve this scholarship because I am a bisexual, biracial woman in STEM and if you don't give me this scholarship I will tell my mother, Kat Von D-- the largest anti-vaxxer in the makeup industry, that you are a big meanie and make her sue. 2. My career goals are to do research on how vaccines are Satan's spawn. Vaccines are Satan's spawn. They cause autism and diabetes. 3. One time I have overcome an obstacle is when my children got measles, mumps, chickenpox, rubella, and tetanus at the same time. My friends got really mad at me and told me that I should have vaccinated them because "vaccines prevent those illnesses", but I told them that vaccines cause autism and diabetes and totally owned them. However, my children did not overcome the obstacles of measles, mumps, chickenpox, rubella and tetanus and the funeral will be on Thursday.

I was sixteen years old and having a panic attack when my Calculus teacher suggested I learn how to knit. "You'd enjoy it" she said. "It's all repetitive action, you know. Over, under, around. Over, under, around." I looked at her-- my bloodshot eyes meeting her clear ones. She held out a pair of knitting needles in one hand and a ball of rainbow yarn in the other. I took the yarn. The crappy rainbow scarf I made over the next few days lies at the bottom of my dog's toy bin. Dozens more scarves are stuffed into nooks and crannies of my dorm room, my parents' house, my grandmother's house, and many other places. There's a couple of shoddily made socks sitting in the bottom of a basket somewhere in the guest room of my parents' home. A few blankets were even donated to Project Linus, a program that accepts homemade blankets and gives them to unfortunate children. But the thing I love to make most are hats. To understand why I love to make hats, you should know some basic knitting knowledge. When you make something that is one-dimensional, you use the straight knitting needles everyone knows and loves. Those make simple pieces of cloth that you can sew together. If you really want to, I guess you could make two pieces of knitted cloth and sew those together to make a hat, but what most people do is use a circular needle. With a circular needle, the needles don't even need to change hands. It's just a simple matter of over, under, around, repeat a couple thousand times, and BAM! You've got a hat! That simple, repetitive action calms me down after a stressful day. It's a weird way to meditate, but it works for me. But really, I think I like to make hats so much is because that was what my calculus teacher liked to make. She gifted me one once I graduated high school, and I still have it to this day. When I was sixteen years old, I never knew that knitting would make such a difference in my life. At nineteen, typing these words while a ball of yarn sits to my left, I'm glad it did.