Fiction was the answer. At least, it's where it started. My mental health has always been on a rollercoaster, being on the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. I've been on the side of taking black pictures of my dark room and uploading rants on private stories, I've been on the side of turning my camera off during facetime to cry because my anxiety, depression, and self-consciousness get too much to handle. I've been on the other end of a cringy google search where you look up "Why do I feel like this? What can I do to stop this? What is wrong with me?" And I found my answer in comics. My favorite characters growing up has always been the, for lack of a better term, broken ones. The presumed "angsty" characters with no choice, no love, and consequently no fear. There's a clear pattern in the characters I grew to love over my years of desperately consuming fictional worlds, and with all their written pain- there's still hope. There is always a story of redemption, whether it's directly on the page or not, and that is what truly brought me into my love for creating videos and art. To pair these unconventional characters with music and timed fade to black screens I taught myself the editing skills I needed and started a small social media account. Within a few months it blew up and I found myself making friends all over the world! Suddenly, I had motivation and inspiration and a way to truly harness my creativity. I found my way to cope, to raise my mental health even just a few pieces at a time- and this impacted my aspirations in a monumental way like never before. I made videos for friends and followers who were feeling down in the dirt and that in itself helped me realize that I could combine my two favorite things- helping people and creating art. I strive to become a cinematographer, to bring scenes to life in a way that will entertain others, and to script the fictional worlds that audiences could escape into. I want to be the person behind those broken characters and give them a happy ending. My battle with depression and mental health is far from over, but I took it into my own hands and found an immensely supportive community that I could rely on. Moving forward, I plan to take more of my life into my own hands and go to college somewhere new, somewhere I can make new friends and support others while making unforgettable experiences that can uplift me when things get rough. My mental health brought me down, and my goals helped to bring it back up- a cycle that will hopefully end in the near future.