As a child, I read voraciously. I was never without a book. My mom would get annoyed at me for reading during meals. My teen years proved difficult, and I was diagnosed with depression. Struggling with it left me without any interest in the things I used to love, and without the energy to read novels. During this time, comics became an important part of my world. They were bite-sized chunks of fiction that I could handle despite depression. What stuck with me most was the Fullmetal Alchemist manga. It gave me a boost of happiness in a time when I had little. The main character had so much against him, and still he never gave up. He fought for what he cared about, no matter how hard it was. It helped me not give up. I began drawing after that, which helped me channel the negativity I was experiencing.

Whether or not you like yourself, you still have inherent worth. Even if you don’t respect yourself, you’re still deserving of respect. This is the hard-won wisdom I have earned, the things I remind myself of over and over when that nasty voice inside my head gets loud. This is the foundation of self-compassion, something I am still learning. Self-compassion does not require you to like yourself. It only means to recognize that as a person, you deserve no less than anybody else. It sounds like such a simple thing, but it's one of the most difficult things I’ve ever pursued. From birth, I have been drilled by the world in what is expected of me. As a woman, I must find a husband and settle down to become a demure housewife content in domesticity. As a lesbian, I am simultaneously breaking those rules and earning myself a set of new ones. As a person in a capitalist society, I must achieve, achieve, achieve in order to be given respect and worth. That’s the real root of the problem, isn’t it? From birth, we are told incessantly that our worth and value come from external factors: from how much money we make or how much we achieve, what others think of us and whether we fulfil the roles assigned to us. You can search your whole life for validation externally, and you’ll always be disappointed. It’ll never be enough because you’re looking for worth in the wrong places. You don’t get your worth from anything or anyone outside yourself. I get angry now, angry that I’ve spent part of my only life striving to live by somebody else’s rules. I break those rules just by being who I am. I only get one existence. I only get one life, and it’s too short to spend lying to myself. I’m never going to fit the expectations of the world, and that’s okay. I am worthy no matter what my path is. I’ve found security in myself, though still young and fragile, but there are so many who haven’t. My little sibling is nonbinary, and they struggle with the rejection of who they are everywhere they go. I know that they are just one in millions of LGBT children who struggle. I think of my great-aunt, a lesbian who spent her whole life alone because her father tried to crush it out of her, and I know I’m incredibly lucky. I’m out of the closet, and I’m never going back in it. I am shattering the ideas of being a woman, being a lesbian, being a member of society, and I hope that as I’m doing it I can shift people’s expectations. I can shift the perceived notions and stereotypes among people who are ignorant. I may not have some great mission in the grand scheme of things. I’m not Marsha P. Johnson, throwing a brick at Stonewall, but I can spread the message of worth and self-compassion to whoever needs it.

Is there anything more vital in a child’s life than a parental figure? Be it the actual biological or adoptive parent, a teacher, a godparent, or any other presence during childhood, the people we grow up around shape who we are and show us how to see the world. My mom is the strongest person I’ve ever known, and having her as my mother was the greatest blessing I could ever have possibly received. Her strength became my strength, her resilience became my resilience, and her heart became my heart. My mom grew up in a poor, single-parent household. She, her mother, and her three siblings all lived in a mobile home. The word “dysfunctional” doesn’t even begin to describe her childhood. School became everything to her, it was her escape. She worked hard, never gave up, and graduated with an English degree from Rice University with zero student debt. Going to college had truly changed my mother’s world. It had been her way out, and she loved everything about it. She learned to develop her own opinions, fact-check information, and grow unshakeable values. My entire life, I have been shaped and influenced by this incredible woman. Her work with CPS made her passionate about childhood development, and so she home-schooled my siblings and me until we were old enough to choose our own education. This taught me how to be passionate about learning, as there was so much freedom to pursue the things that genuinely interested me. From her, I learned how to be a strong, unapologetic woman with a dream. I set boundaries and stand by them, I have strong values that I have determined for myself, I advocate for social justice issues and do my best to educate people on sensitive topics, and it is all thanks to my mother, for she taught me to approach everything with an open mind and give my best effort to all in life. I’m now pursuing an English degree, just like her, and although the prospect of college can be scary at times, I know my mom has made me into someone who can more than handle it. As she taught me to do, I’m following my passion, and I’m going to reach the stars. I want to make her proud. Not everybody has the mother I have. Not everybody has the opportunities I have. Of all the things I value, kindness and caring are most important to me. Everybody deserves respect, regardless of their education level, background, ethnicity, political affiliation, or socio-economic class. I’ll never understand why, as humans, we feel the need to build all these separations between us. I will never stop advocating, never stop educating, which is why with my English degree, I’m planning to become an English teacher. One adult can make all the difference in a child’s life, they just have to be there to give support and kindness. Until then, I will give my all to my education, for learning is one of the greatest human experiences of all.

The year was 2017, I was a sophomore in high school, and I had the profoundly good luck of being placed in Mr. Donnelly’s AP US History class. There’s something so special and important about a teacher who’s genuinely passionate about education; the right teacher can spark passions in you that you didn’t know you had, and the wrong one can mercilessly kill your love of learning. I’ve always been intrigued by history, but Mr. Donnelly brought so much energy and passion to his teaching that APUSH quickly became my favorite class. I hungrily learned, my hand always raised, always ready with a question or an answer. First period with Mr. Donnelly was the highlight of my day. Sophomore year, however, proved to carry a lot of darkness for me. I’ve always struggled with my mental health, but that year, my life crumbled into shambles. In the wake of issues at home, it became harder and harder for me to get out of bed to go to school each morning. I took to keeping my hood up at all times, to shield me from the world. I began to look down instead of up, crumpling in on myself in a desperate attempt to make it through the day. Winter, with its bleak, sunless torment, dragged me down further, and I stopped speaking up in class. I stopped asking questions. I stopped looking up, the readiness to learn having abandoned me. Then, Mr. Donnelly did something that I’ll never forget. The bell rang one chilly December day, and as the rest of the class filed out, he called me aside. He waited in silence until the classroom was empty, then asked me gently if I was okay. He’d noticed, he told me. He’d noticed the life going out of me. He’d noticed his bright and eager student crumple in on herself. He told me he cared, and that if I ever wanted to talk, he was there. He offered his classroom to me, and told me I could come and sit in there whenever I needed, even if I didn’t want to talk. I have never forgotten that moment. Such a simple gesture. I had felt so invisible, so unimportant, and he had noticed. I carried myself more lightly from then on. I never forgot that I had somebody who cared, somebody in my corner. The day that I graduated, I found myself in a classroom that hadn’t been mine since sophomore year. I found myself face-to-face with Mr. Donnelly, thanking him profusely and telling him how much he meant to me. I was unable to stop myself from crying as we hugged goodbye. Kindness is everything, absolutely everything. A kind word can turn somebody’s day around, and a cruel one can stay with them for years. My life has been saved by the kind words and actions of the people around me. I make it a point to be a beacon of kindness wherever I can. I pay attention to people’s nonverbal cues, seeing the subtle changes in their mental wellbeing, and offering support where it’s needed. I’m known among my friends as the one who gives. I’m always baking and cooking treats for them, helping them with tasks, and offering a shoulder to cry on. Life is so much better this way, not only to receive kindness but to give it. The world seems so much sunnier now. I’ll never stop giving my love, and I’ll never stop being grateful to Mr. Donnelly.

My mom always insisted being a woman was wonderful, powerful, even. She always did all she could to shield me from the toxic messages drilled into young girls. She hated the movies that put all focus on the pretty young girl marrying a prince. I can’t remember there ever being a single fashion magazine in our house or a diet ever being mentioned. We owned no scales, read no tabloids, followed no trends. Still, despite all her precautions, the world is so full of these messages that they wheedled their way into my head. I thought that if I wanted to be loved I had to be pretty. I started dieting at eight years old, and have since been locked into life-long hatred for my body. It is because of what I’ve been through, because of my mom’s failure to protect me from these things despite her best efforts, that I am able to see her for who she is and respect her that much more. The odds are always stacked against women, everywhere we turn, and still she forged her own path in life. I’m so grateful that she was the woman shaping my childhood. The more I learn about her, the more in awe I am of her beauty -- her real beauty, that comes from her resiliency, intelligence, and strength. My mother grew up poor in a dysfunctional single-parent household, their five-person family living in a mobile home. There was no way her mother could afford to send her to college, but she didn’t need to. My mom got amazing grades and went to Rice University on scholarships alone. There, she learned to have an open mind and form her own opinions on things. She learned the strength of being able to change your mind instead of being set in your ways. She read the works of Gloria Steinem and learned that being a woman isn’t weak, it’s being a wild and beautiful storm. For as long as I remember, her favorite book has always been Women Who Run With The Wolves. Whenever she hears the word “pussy” being used to mean “weak,” she scoffs and jokes that weak people should be called “scrotes” because a woman can push out a baby and bounce back, but one tap to the groin and a man is down for the count. When she had children, she decided that the public schooling system was too rigid for children, that it destroyed creativity and the joy of learning. My mom single-handedly home-schooled all four of us until we were old enough to choose to go to school of our own accord, an experience that has shaped who I am and granted me the passion for learning that I carry. She has never once put any importance on my physical appearance. Instead, I was encouraged to pursue any activities I wanted and all of my achievements were joyfully celebrated. Still, I was privy to the world’s specially-engineered messages for women, and they hit home. I have so much more respect for my mother for ignoring them for so many years and refusing to play a part in passing them down to her children. I admire her for going her own way, picking her own path, forming her own opinions on things, and deciding to go against the grain because it's what felt right for her and her children. My mom always speaks reverently about higher education. I know that for her, it was her way out. It was her escape, her key to the life she wanted to live. I know it made her a better, happier, stronger person. Thanks to my mother, I am learning that there are so many things about me that are far more interesting than how I look. Thanks to the freedoms my mom granted me and the interests she allowed me to pursue, I have fallen head over heels for words, and to me, the ability to manipulate them is like having magic at my fingertips. I want to follow in my mother’s footsteps and find strength, success, wisdom, and bravery through my education. I am eagerly looking forward to pursuing my degree in Creative Writing, and I am starting to learn that I am truly beautiful, beautiful because I am learning to be unapologetically who I am, not in spite of my flaws but because of my flaws. I’m painfully and imperfectly human, and there’s nothing more beautiful than that.

I take pride in the fact that I am a lesbian. I am lucky enough to have grown up with an open-minded family, in the diverse and accepting area that is Boulder, but it still wasn’t easy coming to terms with my sexuality. I never feared retribution from my family or my community for my identity, but in a society so heteronormative, it was difficult for me to even grasp the concept that I might not be straight. One thing I did grasp quickly, however, was my artistic mind. Homeschooled, I had the freedom to explore everything that interested me. I tried my hand at countless things. I placed in state with my First Lego League robotics team. I did musical theater, karate, soccer, dancing. I studied Japanese and foreign cultures. I devoured knowledge. It was another homeschooled friend who told me about NaNoWriMo -- National Novel Writing Month. It sounded fun, so I gave it a try. That one month sparked a years-long romance with the written word, writing short stories and books and anything my imagination provided me. I knew I had discovered what I was meant to do. My childhood was incredible in a lot of ways, but terrible in many more. Domestic abuse was a common theme in my world. It wasn’t long before depression took root. I fell so hard and so fast. I was unable to get out of bed. My one passion, the one thing that felt right to me, became an impossible task. The critical bully in my head berated me relentlessly every moment that I sat in front of a blank document, begging words to come. Every sentence I wrote, every word, was so wrong in my head. It dragged me down further. I hated myself even more for not being able to write. I was hopelessly blocked, so, at thirteen years old, I left writing behind. It was a confusing and painful period for me, and it was around that time that my hidden sexuality began to surface. Even in an open and accepting community, it was so incredibly difficult for me to see who I truly was. Everything is so heteronormative in this world, so straight all the time. It didn’t even occur to me that I didn’t want to marry a man. Every book had a man and a woman fall in love. The knight saves the princess and they live happily ever after. These stories that I idolized, the stories I longed to write, thrust heterosexuality into my face again and again. Being straight shouldn’t be the norm, the reality is that queer people exist, and we’re everywhere. For a young girl in middle school, with a bad home life, and a head full of demons, it took me years to realize that I was a lesbian. When I did, it was absolutely liberating. I had spent my childhood years viciously rejecting femininity. I wanted to be the knight in the storybooks, the adventurer and hero, not the damsel in distress. Everywhere I looked was the message that a woman’s worth is solely in her appearance, that smarts and assertiveness were not desirable qualities for a young girl. When I accepted my homosexuality, it brought a great moment of relief and growth for me. I saw, for the first time, that I could stand on my own two feet as a woman without a man by my side. I could be me, I could be feminine and flowery and pretty, but also smart and ambitious and strong. Accepting my sexuality led me to accept my femininity, my gender, and myself. I have learned so much about myself and I continue every day to have new realizations. As my depression got more manageable, suddenly the future opened up before me. I had thought I wouldn’t make it to be eighteen years old. College and a career seemed irrelevant. I realized through my growth and healing that I love life, I love everything it has to offer, all the joy and love and sorrow. I have dreams again. I’m an ambitious force to be reckoned with. I began to wonder what my life would be. I couldn’t shake that persistent feeling that in my soul, writing was my calling. I had forsaken it long ago, another casualty of the war waged for years inside my head. Sitting there, contemplating my directionless potential, I cried. I cried for that part of me, that I desperately needed back. I set my resolve. I was going to heal this creative part of me. I again went to war, this time with the relentless voice inside my head telling me I couldn’t do it. Insecure and doubtful, I pressed on anyway. I’m still tentative and afraid, but after years, something has shifted -- I can write again. I want to live. I want to write. I want to advocate for LGBTQ+ issues and write stories with complex queer characters so that the rainbow can see themselves honestly and truly represented. I’m six thousand words into a manuscript, a Victorian-era fantasy exploring gothic themes, the intricacies of death, and homosexual relationships during a conservative time. Attending college means everything to me. I can continue my growth and my healing. I can hone my writing skills so that this feeling in my soul, that I am meant to be a writer, can truly shine through. I want to travel the world, in wonder of this beautiful and terrible world that I barely understand. I hope one day to be a successful author. Until then, I plan to give my all to a Creative Writing degree, then apply for the JET program so that I can live and work in Japan and learn as much as I can about people, cultures, art, and the world. This scholarship would go a long way in financing my first step into this marvelous life.

Accepting my homosexuality helped me overcome my internalized misogyny and be unafraid of my femininity. I have a compassionate community like I've never had before and I feel like part of a huge family who accepts me just as I am. LGBTQ+ people take care of each other, support each other, and lift each other up, and I'm so proud to be part of that. My instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trying.my.bestt/

Fearing death is inherent through all species of life. Rabbits keep watch for predators and flee at the first sign of danger. Birds take off in a frantic flurry of lost feathers when taken by surprise. Humans are perhaps the most fearful of all, for we possess the capacity to imagine death, and the deep dark unknown it brings. How many tales of a fountain of youth or an elixir of life have been told throughout human history? To many, the prospect of never-ending life is appealing over death, for we know what life holds. We can come to terms with what we know. How can we come to terms with something that we can’t possibly understand? The core of the fear of death is not the fear of dying, but the fear of the unknown. There’s no telling what awaits us when our lives are snuffed out. Legacy. Such a human thing. To have a legacy is to cheat death, for even if one no longer draws sweet air into his lungs, he can rest easy knowing some form of his existence carries on, in a family line, in a piece of art, in social or political change. Death scares me, too. After all, my existence is all I know, and everything I ever will know, yet the endless and relentless waves of time can erase me and everything I ever did like a candle being blown out. How many untold billions of humans have walked this earth, and how many of them remain in our consciousness today? A legacy, such a beautiful, illogical, deeply human thing, is, in a way, a dip in the proverbial fountain of youth. A signature, a stamp, something to scream to the unforgiving future that I exist. I exist. I exist. I stood in the gardens of Tenryu-ji Temple in Japan, gazing at the flawless garden before me, and knew I was standing in the footsteps of history. I was lucky enough to have the landscaping explained to me by a resident monk. Moss-blanketed stones to represent cranes and tortoises gently dotted the gourd-shaped pond. Nothing, not a single tree, was there by accident, and it was one of the sights I’ll never forget. The sight burned into my brain is the very sight that the monks have been carefully tending to and observing for hundreds of years. There are so many other countries I have yet to see, so many foods I have yet to taste, so many colors I don’t even know, and yet, all of the experiences of my life can disappear with me, lost to time. From passion, empires rise and fall. People unite and divide. Words last centuries. Moments last millennia. We find what makes us the same, and we discover our deepest differences. Wonder. It is the one thing that unites every nation, every culture, every single person. Passion. Curiosity. Creativity. Fear. These are the forces that burn away inside of us, making us hot and hungry, driving us to incredible things. To write. To sing. To paint. To speak. Poetry, translated into hundreds of languages, touches hearts just the same. The same feeling that burned within Michelangelo as he chiseled David to life from cold stone also burned within Van Gogh as his depression ripped everything away except the simple act of putting paint to canvas. It is the same fire that burns within me, moving my fingers to write, to dream, to create. Wonder is my legacy. We artists are blessed, for we have the tools at our fingertips to brand our existence on this earth and leave behind something beautiful when we are reduced to dust. It stirs my heart and makes my soul itch to create some beauty of my own. Wonder. Beauty. Pain. Change. For a single taste of that kind of immortality, I will spend my whole life searching. I am meant for creation. The greatest crime I could commit is that of turning away from myself, making myself small, to try and shy away from the fire of immortality that I carry within.

It is the light you see in the faces of children. It drives us from day to day, that glowing ember burning insistently in your soul. As we grow older, it is stifled, smothered behind family and finance, responsibility and regret. Sometimes the flame becomes so small that we forget it’s there, certain that whatever wonder filled us as children is long gone, lost to reality. But the ember never burns out until the day the very flame of our existence is extinguished. Wonder. It is the one thing that unites every nation, every culture, every single person. Passion. Curiosity. Creativity. These are the forces that burn away inside of us, making us hot and hungry, driving us to incredible things. To write. To sing. To paint. To speak. Poetry, translated into hundreds of languages, touches hearts just the same. The same feeling that burned within Michelangelo as he chiseled David to life from cold stone also burned within Van Gogh as his depression ripped everything away except the simple act of putting paint to canvas. It is the same fire that burns within me, moving my fingers to write, to dream, to create. I stood in the gardens of Tenryu-ji Temple, gazing at the flawless garden before me, and knew I was standing in the footsteps of history. I was lucky enough to have the landscaping explained to me by a resident monk. Moss-blanketed stones to represent cranes and tortoises gently dotted the gourd-shaped pond. Nothing, not a single tree, was there by accident, and it was one of the sights I’ll never forget. The sight burned into my brain is the very sight that the monks have been carefully tending and observing for hundreds of years. There are so many other countries I have yet to see, so many foods I have yet to taste, so many colors I don’t even know. From passion, empires rise and fall. People unite and divide. Words last centuries. Moments last millennia. We find what makes us the same, and we discover our deepest differences. I am a writer, and my heart belongs to the beauty I felt in Japan. So much so, that I have spent years studying the language so that I might live there one day. I didn’t grow up connected to a sense of culture, and I feel that loss deeply. There is so much beauty in the traditions, food, and art that grow among communities. It stirs my heart and makes my soul itch to create some beauty of my own. I aim to study abroad during my secondary education. I will travel everywhere within my means, and after I graduate, I have no intention of remaining in the States. I need art around me. I need to experience different cultures. It makes my fingers itch to churn out words. Wonder. Beauty. Pain. Change. For a single taste of that kind of immortality, I will spend my whole life searching. I am meant for creation. The greatest crime I could commit is that of turning away from myself, making myself small, to try and shy away from the fire I carry within.