Boldly, Unapologetically Me I have learned that the most uncomfortable thing you can do in a room full of authority is name what everyone is carefully avoiding. When I stood before the Nantucket Board of Health to speak on the proposed turf field and track, I made a deliberate choice. I was not going to be one more voice in the scientific debate about PFAS contamination and aquifer safety, important as those concerns are. Instead, I was going to say the thing no one else was saying: that mental health is a public health issue, and that our Board of Health had a responsibility to weigh it. I reminded them of the suicide cluster that devastated our high school community in 2007 and 2008. I spoke about what quality athletic facilities actually provide: not just sport, but resilience, belonging, distress tolerance, identity, and connection to something larger than oneself. I named the stigma around mental health directly and invoked Morgan's Message, a cause I had advocated for as both a Varsity sailor and Varsity field hockey player. The room got uncomfortable. I felt it. And I kept going anyway. That moment mattered to me because it represented a version of myself I have been growing into one who doesn't shrink around institutions or defer to authority simply because authority is present. I believe mental health deserves a seat at every table where community wellbeing is being decided, and I was willing to be the person who insisted on it, even when my voice shook. Being unapologetically yourself doesn't always feel triumphant in the moment. Sometimes it just feels necessary. Did I mention I plan to study Psychology at college?! :)

Kindness In Action There is a particular kind of freedom that comes from being seen, not for what you cannot do, but simply for who you are. I witnessed that freedom bloom on the face of my Special Connections mentee, Lily, on an afternoon we spent together volunteering at the Nantucket Offshore Animal Hospital. Lily is thirteen years old, non-verbal, and navigates the world with physical limitations that affect how she walks. She is also one of the most joyful people I have ever met, someone who greets ordinary moments with a delight that quietly teaches you to pay better attention. We connected through Nantucket S.T.A.R., a nonprofit dedicated to providing inclusive, adaptive recreational opportunities for children with special needs on the island. That day at the animal hospital, something shifted. We were there without her parents, just the two of us feeding animals, offering gentle care to creatures waiting for homes of their own. Lily was luminous. I could feel in her whole body that she felt capable and free, doing something that mattered, on her own terms. What struck me most was recognizing that this simple act, showing up together, trusting her, and letting her lead was itself a form of advocacy. Lily deserves experiences that don't just accommodate her, but genuinely include her. When she lights up the way she does when she sees me, it reminds me that presence is its own form of kindness. You don't always need words. Sometimes you just need someone willing to show up and say, without saying anything at all: you belong here, exactly as you are. Boldly, Unapologetically Me I have learned that the most uncomfortable thing you can do in a room full of authority is name what everyone is carefully avoiding. When I stood before the Nantucket Board of Health to speak on the proposed turf field and track, I made a deliberate choice. I was not going to be one more voice in the scientific debate about PFAS contamination and aquifer safety, important as those concerns are. Instead, I was going to say the thing no one else was saying: that mental health is a public health issue, and that our Board of Health had a responsibility to weigh it. I reminded them of the suicide cluster that devastated our high school community in 2007 and 2008. I spoke about what quality athletic facilities actually provide: not just sport, but resilience, belonging, distress tolerance, identity, and connection to something larger than oneself. I named the stigma around mental health directly and invoked Morgan's Message, a cause I had advocated for as both a sailor and a field hockey player. The room got uncomfortable. I felt it. And I kept going anyway. That moment mattered to me because it represented a version of myself I have been growing into, the one who doesn't shrink around institutions or defer to authority simply because authority is present. I believe mental health deserves a seat at every table where community wellbeing is being decided, and I was willing to be the person who insisted on it, even when my voice shook. Being unapologetically yourself doesn't always feel triumphant in the moment. Sometimes it just feels necessary. Did I mention I plan to study Psychology?!

The Weight We Inherit: My Family's Financial Story Money in my family has never been just money. It has been shame, survival, scarcity, and silence passed down through generations like a wound no one quite knew how to name. It begins with my great-grandfather, who ran a family shoe business and left behind a devastating unpaid debt from a contract with the Canadian government for military-issue boots. My grandfather inherited not just the business, but that crushing deficit. Despite his genuine efforts to pivot the factory toward fashion markets, the weight of that inherited liability proved insurmountable. He lost everything: the business, his marriage, eventually his sense of himself. What followed were years of poor decisions compounded by depression, a man undone not only by financial failure but by the absence of any tools to recover from it. My mother was a little girl watching all of this unfold from the margins. She learned to read her father's mood by the size of the bill stack in his pocket on Friday afternoons. No ATMs, no credit cards, just whatever cash he had to stretch through the weekend. She remembers pretending not to notice when items had to go back on the grocery store shelves, her father framing it as a game, while she understood perfectly what it meant. He died when she was twelve, but the scarcity he carried didn't die with him. She absorbed it into her body, her nervous system, her relationship with money for the rest of her life. My father arrived from the opposite direction, not scarcity exactly, but avoidance. No savings, no planning, spending beyond his means and then playing the victim of circumstances he helped create. In fairness to him, no one taught him either. Financial illiteracy is its own kind of inheritance. I grew up at the intersection of these two legacies: one rooted in fear of never having enough, the other in the refusal to plan. What I received from my family was a single, incomplete instruction: work hard and spend freely. That's not a financial education. That's a pattern waiting to repeat. I am choosing to interrupt it. My eleventh-grade personal finance class gave me a foundation, and now I intend to build on it deliberately, learning to budget, to save, and eventually to invest. I want to be the generation in my family that finally rewrites the story money has been telling about us.