My mother never intended to get pregnant with me. She was in her mid 30s, wooed by a man nearly a decade younger. The fling wasn’t ever meant to be more than that. Still, when she told him she was pregnant he offered to marry her, but she said no because she knew her didn’t love her like that and she’d been down that road before. She’d survived two marriages, the first extremely abusive and the source of my two older siblings and the second not so much abusive as toxic. She didn’t want any more marriages in her life. I don’t know if they had talked about co-parenting plans before my father’s motorcycle accident that crippled him from the waist down two weeks before I was born, but I know she told him he could see me whenever he wanted to. He suffered from extreme depression and chronic pain after the accident, though, so I only saw him about two weeks out of the year, during the summer. He died in a second motorbike accident when I was eleven. My mother was fiercely independent while I was growing up. She finished her college degree with night school courses and took me to class with her when she couldn’t find a sitter. She got a job with the city, saved up, and bought a house. Eventually, she sold it and moved us to Oregon where she saved up to buy a house again. Looking back, especially as a parent now, I don’t know how she did it. She worked constantly: at her steady nine to five job, making dinner and cleaning the house every night when she got home, tending the garden and yard every weekend. Our yard was beautiful, our house was clean, and our bellies were full of good things, and it was just her and me. She was always pinching pennies and saving money. She taught me early on the read labels and compare ingredients and amounts. I didn’t appreciate it at the time because I wanted Trix no matter what the labels said. She was insistent, though, to always check the labels and use any coupons for stuff that’s on your list, and go to the cheapest gas station you can find. When something broke, she’d always try to fix it herself first even if it took some research first. She was more successful than not. Her consistency in this endeavor taught by example the importance of home maintenance, self reliance, self education, determination and knowing when and who to ask for help. She taught me the basics of cooking, gardening, cleaning, and preserving food. She encouraged me to value education and lifelong learning, self reliance and trust, and kindness to animals and children. I have grown up with confidence in myself and my ability to learn, trust in myself to help and do right by others, and an ingrained frugality that focuses on long term benefits wherever possible.

The mental illness in my life has always resisted the binary ways of thinking the world at large is so fond of, but I didn’t always appreciate it. Even when binary perspectives attempt to be inclusive they ultimately fail to capture the scope of what living with mental illness is like just as the oversimplifies the complicated braid of love, endurance, and self care it takes to live with or take care of someone with mental illness. People get caught up in juxtapositions and say things like mental illness ends is inconvenient but also a source of creativity, overlooking the challenging reality of inconvenient creativity An example of inconvenient creativity is anxiety. My partner and my eldest son, when their creativity is not turned outward, when they lack the motivation for working on a project, turn all that creative force towards worry. Their blood pressure increases, tempers shorten, and panic attacks stand at the ready as they become consumed by their imagined fears. In not interrupted quickly enough, the cycle inevitably culminates in a fight-flight response, a response that sometimes presents real danger to themselves and their loved ones. There are other, less dramatic ways creativity can be inconvenient, like seeing a multitude of solutions or pathways and being paralyzed by indecision. This happens to me often whether I’m working on an art project, balancing schedules, or writing essays. I get why people want to praise the creativity and pattern recognition of neurodivergent people, of course. For so long attempts to identify the positives of mental illness have been vastly overshadowed by the inconveniences and discomfort caused on individual and societal levels. I understand the desire to counteract stigma but think tactic of simply putting a positive spin on it. For the bulk of my untreated life, putting a positive spin on my mental illness did not work. Rather, it made it easier to excuse my self destructive habits and my disregard for how my behavior impacted others. It also made me drop faster into despair when I could not force a positive outlook over my predicament. My self worth became tied to what my mental illness—not me—could produce for other people and when output was low, I went even lower. The same happens when I have tried to put a positive spin on my son’s mental illness. It makes him, a suicidal eight year old, feel like I don’t love all of him or that I only love him when he produces “good” art, “good” report cards, “good” performance. Time and again I’ve found myself slipping into that binary mode of thinking and, out of love, toxic positivity. But that’s not what is needed. The scariest part of mental illness is not knowing what’s real, not knowing which thoughts are lying to you, which memories and situations were a little too creatively altered by anxiety. It’s with unfair irony that positivity validates all the worst opinions about oneself every time failure is perceived. This balancing of inconvenience and creativity and the interweaving of both within the reality’s demands for nonbinary thinking has led me to a recognition of the error of absolutes in my relationships and my goals. I don’t think I could have ever made my way to this epiphany without therapy and sobriety from everything but prescribed meds. It is absolutely wild how real and intense all the thoughts and feelings driven by mental illness can be so drastically rerouted through medication and self aware redirection. Sometimes torment really is just a chemical imbalance. For about half my adult life, my only goal in life was to party myself to death. After my first suicide attempt at 16, I had promised my family I wouldn’t try again. But I knew if I overdosed or otherwise died while intoxicants, it wouldn’t technically be ruled a suicide. Only I would know and I’d be dead. I’d go out laughing and flipping the bird to all the loneliness of not being understood, and the isolation of not understanding what parts of me were real and which weren’t, which mattered and which didn’t. With pregnancy in my late 20s can sobriety and with that came new goals—still using my aberrant thoughts to write stand up comedy routines and sell paintings at shows I performed at, still being independent despite parenthood, still doing the same things I had been doing but without the self destruction. I was all over the place, split, trying to be so much at once. But I was also more content than I’d ever been up to that point. The world shutting down in 2020 brought with it more demons however, and they overcame me. My goals shriveled down to survival despite my suicidal ideation. Attempts weren’t practical —it just wasn’t something I could do, take away myself from my child forever—but the thoughts would go away. I was a phantom drifting in and out of time. Flashbacks wreaked havoc on my sleep and nervous system, frequently shutting me down with panic attacks and dissociation. There were no longterm goals in the time period. Surviving each moment and being as present as possible for my child was all I could focus on. It was all that mattered. Eventually, sobriety, individual therapy, official diagnoses, medication, family therapy and a lot of self care rewrote my understanding of my own and others’ mental illness. It’s not as simple as a chemical imbalance. It’s not just an allergy to world paradigms. It is more like an invisible disability. It is convoluted and individual. The care it requires must by necessity be tailored. The people who are caretaking need their own supports and boundaries respected. The reality of mental illness should not be looked down on just as it should not be romanticized.

For most of my life I have been suicidal. I also grew up among so-called functional alcoholics. My first glass of whiskey was when I was 10 years old. My first serious suicide attempt was at 16 years old. My family responded to this by making me promise to never try again, and then welcoming me into adult circles and all the pot and booze that went along with them. I immediately recognized, whether they did or not, they were offering me a more socially acceptable form of suicide, an option for a slow death under the guise of fun. I took it. I never intended to stop until it killed me. I also never intended to get pregnant. I didn’t think I could, but I did. Everything changed. I thrust myself into sobriety for the first time in my adult life. It was an abrupt removal of rose-colored glasses. The drunken community I had surrounded myself with was toxic. My family, which I had always been desperate for approval from, was not comprised of people whose company I enjoyed without intoxication. It was like suddenly being pulled out of a cult. I didn’t ever want to go back. I did, though. COVID and 2020 shook loose long-buried memories of childhood trauma. I didn’t know how to cope. I became debilitatingly depressed and struggled to function on the most basic levels. The solution of the people closest to me was to offer me stimulants so I would at least do chores. A terrible cycle began. As soon as my son fell asleep, I would take the stimulants and clean the house, prepare foods for the next day, do laundry, etc. After I was done, I binge drank until I could sleep. The next morning I’d be barely functional, just going through the motions, following the schedule. I felt like a zombie robot, like a ghost of a person with invisible claws of needs I could never fulfill ripping at my heart. I desperately wanted to change for my child. He deserved a present parent, an energetic parent. Immediate family members didn’t see the problem, didn’t see the point of wanting to stop. Some actively pressured me not to, telling me I’d never be able to, that I was less manageable and a worse person without the drugs and alcohol. This filled me with rage. I was going to quit and I would do it out of spite. After a couple years of different tactics, different meetings, different readings and philosophies, I settled on tapering down on a strict schedule. By the end of summer of 2023 I had already kicked the booze out of my life. Next was the snow and cigarettes. I had a couple months left for those on the schedule when I again found out I was pregnant. I stopped immediately and it plunged me into a bad depression. I immediately sought out medical assistance from my OBGYN, found a therapist, and joined a treatment program. I wanted tools against relapse I did not have before. Through treatment and diagnoses of mental impairments I’ve had all my life but was never treated for, I gained those skills. At first I viewed the past decade and a half as life wasted. But going back to college has affirmed for me I bring a unique insight into the study of history that is lacking in many scholars. My experience also enables me to relate to a wide variety of people, which I believe will be invaluable in a public library setting.

Meaning is a metamorphic thing. The meaning of recovery has changed repeatedly throughout my life. In my early 20s, recovery was a sad joke of a mirage, a cult without any of the fun parts. It was easy to see it that way from my high horse, in drunken denial of my full speed gallop away from pain, shame, and haunting memories. I convinced myself I was running towards something when mostly I was just running away. After I became pregnant at 27, I experienced sobriety for the first time in my life. It was a culture shock, a lifted veil. Recovery became a serious thing full of hard truths. When I relapsed in 2020, recovery’s meaning changed again to sheer cliff of impossible expectations, a daunting climb I’d never get to the top of again. Still, I tried. When I became pregnant in 2023, I ceased my tapering efforts and went cold turkey again. Except this time, I went into a recovery program, too. By the time i started the program, I was already a couple months sober. I wanted tools at hand to combat relapse, unlike before. Now, three years later, the meaning of recovery for me is again completely different from what it had been. It’s being present for loved ones. It’s having energy in the morning. It’s confidence. Its freedom from self destruction.

The biggest challenge of returning to school has been the demands and expectations of home life not changing at all. Childcare, appointments, and medications all need to be managed for multiple people, a task that involves coordinating the schedules abd cooperation of almost a dozen induviduals. Layered on top of this challenge are the specisl needs of my children: one is a toddler and the other a developmentally disabled eight-year-old who needs a lot of specific supports neurotypical children do not require. Compounding all this is the fact my partner suffered from a serious illness two years ago that had left him mostly disabled and me the only source of our household's income--on top of parenting, scheduling, and returning to school, I am who pays all the bills, fills out all the forms, and does all the grocery shopping. That said, things really aren't so bad. I’m lucky. Being back in school has been reinvigorating for me and infused me with hope I had long ago abandoned. The current situation requires constant adaptation. I’m also lucky to have my sister, who has practically raised my second child with all the free childcare she’s provided. She insists it’s an arrangement that has made her feel lucky, too, since she had always wanted a little one but had never been able to conceive. My past consistent hard work getting my disabled child help has also been paying off a lot. After years of forms of waiting, our family finally has access to the programs we need for direct support professionals. This access to support is also what led me to a new job of caring for adults with developmental disabilities, which does not mind me doing homework while on shift. When I am working or at school, I can trust my eldest has the support and enrichment of DSPs while the youngest is in the care of my sister. One major concern left to juggle at home is the care of my mother, who suffered a series of strokes a couple years ago and is in a prolonged state of cognitive decline. Already living paycheck to paycheck, I cannot afford child care but I am currently applying for grants, scholarships, and childcare programs to utilize in this upcoming year for the toddler’s child care. This would free up my sister to take care of our mother and we’re really hoping something works out soon. Those being the biggest obstacles, the small ones all add up, too. Mundane mountains of chores are the landscape of our home. It requires constant reassessment of priorities and multitasking. For example, safety or hygiene hazards are priority clean ups over something like a full laundry basket. Making sure everyone is fed before I leave in the morning is the priority over things like hair brushing. As far as multitasking, I am constantly working on assignments in any spare moment. This can sometimes be seamlessly integrated into my daily tasks, like when I’m lucky enough to find an audiobook of an assigned text and can listen to it while I do the dishes. Other times, it requires a sacrifice of attention such as family movie night when I am cuddled up with the kids, but my attention is on my assignment. It’s easy to get swept up in the constant work mode. I am thankful my sister, therapist, and family therapist regularly remind me to take breaks and make time for me. That has been a bigger challenge than I give it credit for but I recognize its importance in preventing burn out.

I have spent most of my adult life well below the poverty line. The most I’ve ever earned was $28,000 a year which was a truly grueling experience involving low pay, high stress, and abhorrently long shifts. It was unavoidable though since I had just given birth to my second child when my mother, who I live with suffered a series of strokes. Only a few months later my partner became severely ill and disabled. I was left with a mountain of bills and took the first job I could get. I worked constantly. My second child was practically raised by my sister who, luckily for me, provided free childcare. My older child who has severe behavioral disabilities struggled immensely with the transition to be suddenly being home so little and usually exhausted. My crossroads came during a particularly stressful time at the job when two groups of managers were both demanding I take exact opposite actions at the same time in addition to somehow urging the team I was leading to complete several days with a work in a single shift. A day earlier, I had been told by my eldest’s special education school they were expelling him, which meant he simultaneously lost medication management and therapy, and that there was no way for the school district to help him other than an hour of tutoring a day supplemented by homeschooling. The following morning, my partner texted me while I was taking a break trying to figure out the best course of action between the rock and the hard place at work. He told me he had fallen down the stairs and injured his surgery wounds and didn’t know who to call for help with our distraught and disregulated child. Running my priorities, I walked out on the job and went home to help my family. While looking for a new job, I immediately designed a comprehensive homeschooling schedule for my son. We spent a lot of time at the library. Really, we had always spent a lot of time there going to story times and events and making crafts, but now we were there everyday. For some reason, the thought of being a librarian had never occurred to me before then. I had dropped out of college years before my eldest child was born and become a stand up comedian. I had never intended to go back and finish. Then again, I’d never intended to be a parent, either. Now that I considered it, I had a lot of skillsets both from college, work, and life experience that made we well suited to being a librarian. Upon looking up what it takes to join the profession, my curiosity cemented into a course of action and enthusiasm. Between experience organizing comedy shows to donate to local charities, working with adults with developmental disabilities and children, writing, and organizing with attention to detail, I felt in a way I had already been subconsciously preparing myself for a lifelong role serving my community. I have paid out of pocket for the three courses taken in spring and winter term this year, using my tax return. With those funds exhausted, I am hoping I will be able to secure some financial aid. I cannot use my employment income and risk our housing or general well-being. But I can make the time to apply for every scholarship I come across that I am eligible for, cross my fingers, and hope.

There are few things I love more than libraries and school. I wanted to go to school forever, be a lifelong learner. But my mental health became unmanageable in my early 20s. I rolled myself steadily downhill into a pit of addiction I didn’t know how to escape. I didn’t even know how to want to. I gave up, dropped out, and became a comedian. Instead of wrestling with my demons, I partied with them. Then something unexpected happened: my first pregnancy. I’d wanted a one night stand and I found one. Except I didn’t think I’d get pregnant. I didn’t think I’d fall in love. I was catapulted into the longest period of sobriety I’d ever experienced. Everyone expected me to quit comedy. I refused. I continued to write, to make posters, and produce comedy shows to donate to local non-profits. Three months after the birth of my first child, I recorded my comedy album. A year after, I went on a West Coast mini tour. I also ready books and research on brain development and did everything I could to give my son a better childhood than I had. Then: 2020. No more comedy, not with a toddler and elderly mother at home. No more library, either. So, isolation. But things were fine for a while—I helped people who were struggling more than us, I kept writing, kept looking for ways to enrich my child’s life. When he started learning how to talk though, it unlocked terrible memories from my own early childhood. I struggled with intense panic attacks, flashbacks without warning, debilitating depression and episodes of terror. I relapsed. I hated the world, hated myself more than ever before. I wanted to peel off that poisonous, insatiable need for comfort. I wanted to go back to sober. Little by little, I clawed my way towards my goal. I tapered. Kept to a schedule. Relentlessly advocated for my son when he began having trouble at school because of his disabilities. I needed to fight for that sobriety, that release from need, just as hard as I fought for him to have therapists and psychiatrists and and the support he deserved. Unlike my motivated zeal for improving my son’s life, my struggle to improve my own was not out of love. I was compelled by sheer spite. Then, another surprise pregnancy and again things changed. Paid no mind to the people not cheering me on, stopped feeding the spite. Fed love instead. Already sober, I went to treatment. Had to have tools in my belt to defeat the relapse. Had to let go of the anger at myself for not using the tools I didn’t have in the past. Second baby was born and left the hospital with me as my partner went in. He needed surgery. He couldn’t even hold the baby for months—doctor’s orders. I had to get a job and work and work and work. It was barely enough. It wasn’t enough. But I kept working. Kept going to therapy. Kept getting my kids to all their appointments. Kept doing all the dishes. My eldest was kicked out of school; suicidal at eight years old. I quit my job and homeschooled him while I looked for another one I could keep everyone fed and housed and cared for with. There weren’t any. We were spending most our time at the library again and I found myself wondering, dreaming, maybe I could work at a library someday. Curious, I looked up what it would take. I had some college already in the bag, after all, a knack for creative problem solving, and a general love of books. What I found out didn’t discourage me like it would’ve years ago, it only solidified my determination and my enthusiasm to try. I only needed a little over a year (now only one year) to finish my bachelors degree. A lot of ALA accredited MLIS programs were online if it was too costly to move to a state that had one. I re-enrolled and had the chance to learn all over again just how much I loved school, how much I had missed it. This time around it was a whole different set of difficulties though. Sure, I was sober and in therapy, the most stable and happy I’d ever been in my life, but I also had a developmentally disabled eight year old at home with severe separation anxiety struggling with adjusting to me suddenly be gone all the time not just for work but school as well. I had to manage not only my school and work schedules, but coordinate half a dozen other people’s schedules with one another in order to ensure both children had constant childcare and weren’t missing any appointments. I also had to contend with my aging mother’s cognitive decline which removed her from the pool of viable childcare candidates. Frankly it was—and is—a lot. I delegate and plan ahead as much as possible. I am unwilling to sacrifice my children’s wellbeing for my ambitions yet need to strike a balance between them since my schooling ambitions very much encompass my children’s future wellbeing. For the bulk of their lives, I’ve made about $10,000 a year. I cannot even fathom what it must be like to earn $40,000, which is the lower end of what librarians make. I am highly motivated to achieve this level of stable income, especially with my mother’s continued decline—if she can’t pay the mortgage or sells the house or passes away suddenly, we will have nowhere to live that I can afford. I know I could just settle for a bachelor’s degree and hope that will give me the ability to keep my family financially secure, but since I’m making the effort, I’d really like to try to make an effort not just for my kids but for me. Being a librarian is something I want for me that would also happen to be good for my kids.

I am someone who continually gives back in any way they can. I’m also someone who has needed a lot of help from others and wants to pay that forward. My background gives me a unique perspective and skillset that will enable me to do just that, hopefully for a lot of people. My undergraduate degree is in history, a subject I very much have a passion and knack for. When I dropped out of college in 2012, I couldn’t quite leave the history behind. I’d regularly work it into my standup comedy routines—I even included a bibliography on the back of the poster for my comedy album. For the 10 years I was out of school, I was producing comedy shows for local non-profits, making event posters, and injecting mini history lessons for audiences in my jokes. It wasn’t an intentional study of public speaking, lecturing, and event planning but that’s what it ended up being. As my first children got older, I realized he had behavioral disabilities. After years of advocating for him, I was finally able to get him the services he needed and by doing so found myself a new job I hadn’t considered before—direct support professional for people with special needs. While homeschooling my son at the library, it suddenly struck me I had acquired the skills of our favorite librarians, particularly the abilities to welcome anyone and help them on their terms, reading children’s books aloud with flair and personality, experience with a variety of crafts and art projects, and planning fun, community oriented events. I had never considered being a librarian before, but it suddenly struck me as a perfect convergence of my diverse skillset. I couldn’t shake the thought. I had spent a long time believing school was a part of my life I’d always miss but never be able to go back to, but that irresistible thought brought me back to it. With no funding other than my tax return, I reenrolled for winter term 2026, fourteen years after I had l left. I could afford only two classes and had to continue working during the term—rent and diapers still needed to be paid for. The term was difficult but I was determined and I received As in both classes despite multiple challenges from work and my son. One on my term papers was published in the undergraduate history journal. The tax return exhausted and my son needing more support as we transition to me being back in school, I could only take one class this spring term. I expect a high grade in it as well. If I can find a way to pay for it and can go to school full time in the 2026-2027 school year, I can easily graduate in spring 2027 and apply to graduate school for a MLIS program. That is what I intend to do. Ideally, I’d like to complete both programs and find a position at a public library as quickly as possible—my family needs support now and that need will only grow in the coming years. Ideals rarely meet reality in my experience though, and I will continue with whatever schooling I can afford whenever I can afford it for as long as it takes.