No other artist has emerged as a Queer icon quite as quickly as Chappell Roan. In an increasingly divided political climate, Chappell Roan has created music that transcends identity lines and speaks to so many people's experiences all at once. Her ability to blend upbeat melodies with minor scales that evoke pain and suffering resonates with several generations of fans alive today who came of age in the new millennium, scrambling for the same security their predecessors seem to have freely enjoyed. There’s a sense that her music and lyrics reflect both the social progress we’ve made and the precariousness of those victories in a divided world. The first time I listened to Pink Pony Club as a queer person from a small town now living in LA, I teared up thinking about the life I have now and what it took to get here. No other artist has had such a profound effect on me, nor has any song prompted this level of self-reflection in just a few short minutes. I believe Chappell Roan deserves the highest praise and accolades because she’s had this impact not just on me but on millions of fans who’ve fought to be treated with fairness, dignity, and have found strength in their experiences, despite the pain and trauma.

Working to create value isn't always measured in actualized revenue. This is something I've known to be true from the beginning of my career in social services through to my later work in tech consulting. While operating revenue is important, there's a deeper kind of value that resonates with me personally: achieving challenging milestones, growing my technical abilities, and seeing solutions through from start to finish. Of all the environments I've had the opportunity to work in, public service has been the one that allows for all of these simultaneously. The work public servants take on is never-ending—the demand is always higher than the supply. This creates a unique challenge: How do I balance what I can do with what everyone needs from me? It's a question that requires constant renegotiation throughout a public service career. Finding satisfaction not in completing all the work, but in performing at the highest level possible, is a rewarding shift in perspective. Growth and development are also recognized as vital investments in one's work. Public servants have the opportunity to choose their own development, pursue the avenues they want to follow, and grow professionally in ways that align much more closely with their personal goals. In contrast, the private sector often ties growth and development to corporate revenue streams or the company's chosen direction regarding branding, products, or service offerings. In the public sector, there's greater flexibility based on current needs, trends, and foresight into the future needs of the population these departments will serve. Often, there’s a culture where, if someone can substantiate their career aspirations and demonstrate the ability to pursue them, public sector organizations will actively support their goals. Another key advantage is the ability to see projects through from start to finish in public service. While there are times when strategic realignments, shifting priorities, or reorganizations prevent this, more often than not, when the results become apparent, we can take pride in knowing we’ve made meaningful contributions. This sense of accomplishment is a rare experience in private sector employment, where the lifespan of a project is often tied solely to its immediate profitability. Rarely do long-term investments take root in private enterprise if they don’t offer immediate returns, and staff may not remain on the project if it doesn't deliver that short-term gratification. Public service is an investment in society. It requires the understanding that the value generated from one's actions isn’t always immediately felt but that the long-term vision will create a lasting impact.

"Girl, So Confusing" has to be my favorite by far. It's the top song for me because it's so relatable! These days, it's become all too common for people to judge one another based on faulty perceptions or miscommunications. The song captures how normalized it's become for young people to take what's presented on social media as the ultimate source of truth about others. We start identifying with these personas, and it can make us feel like we don't measure up to expectations or to other people's achievements. It can even feel like we're discovering who people in our lives really are through a filter of comparison. The song also challenges us to look beyond the veneer of social media and the branded identities we create online, urging us to find commonalities. Especially in the remix with Lorde, Charli takes it a step further by delivering a raw dialogue between the two artists. The lyrics from both present an open conversation about insecurities, traumas, and experiences that many listeners can relate to. It frames the two celebrities as 'real people' with everyday problems. It's refreshing to not idolize performers for their wealth or chart-topping success, but to celebrate their art on a human level. Knowing that everyone, regardless of their social stature, experiences the same kinds of insecurities brings these struggles into the open and gives us all permission to talk about them.

Higher education used to scare me. It was this looming thing that adults in my life would bring up like a threat: "If you don't go to college, or if you wait, you'll never make anything of yourself!" How was I supposed to push back on that logic? My parents struggled financially—none of them, whether it was my mom, dad, step-dad, or step-mom, had gone to college. Everyone around me seemed to be in a constant struggle, for reasons I couldn’t fully grasp: layoffs, store closures, bankruptcies, high-interest loans. The only thing that made sense to me at the time was this general assumption that college was the key to avoiding all of it. So, I went to college. I started with an associate degree in Social Work. This decision came from the one person in my life who seemed to have it all figured out was a social worker. He ran the youth group I attended with my friends, and I basically tried to replicate his life without ever really asking if it was what I wanted. I thought, "It worked for him, so it’s bound to work for me!" It didn’t. Social work is a critical and meaningful field with talented people, but it’s still subject to the same market shifts: layoffs, and underfunding as any other job. Worse, burnout is a huge issue, with overwhelming caseloads and low pay. After a few contract jobs in the field, I realized I had to face the truth: this wasn’t for me. Years later, I went back to school—maybe a bit older, and hopefully a bit wiser (though I won’t get ahead of myself). This time, after really reflecting on what interested me, I decided to give STEM a shot. It was challenging at first, but I found that I had an aptitude for grasping complex systems and technical subjects in ways I hadn’t been able to with more abstract social ones. Immersing myself in the world of technology, I started learning about data, its role in nearly every field, and eventually found my way to cybersecurity. Being a non-traditional student gave me the space and time to take stock of my strengths, my interests, and where I truly wanted to go. I learned that "vocation" isn’t just about following a prescribed path—it’s about understanding yourself, listening inward, and choosing how to spend your time in a way that gives your life meaning. It’s led me to a career I’m passionate about, and more importantly, it’s shown me that it’s never too late to change direction.

'Invisible disabilities' are aptly named because they can be so invisible that they end up impacting your life, even when you don't know they're there. I happened to be one of these cases. My disability had historically made me into the kid who always needed to be wrangled, the one that teachers just couldn't figure out. It earned me a unique label very early: a problem. I seemed to have less tolerance for teasing than my peers and a lower threshold for losing attention or lacking motivation to participate in regularly assigned subjects. This is what defined me as 'a problem'—I just couldn't seem to measure up against the 'normal' kids. Why were they able to handle social pressures that I couldn't? Why could they engage with subjects that I couldn't? Well, as it turns out, I was Autistic. I wasn't non-verbal, and I didn't have the cognitive limitations that others seemed to associate with the condition. By all accounts, I was gifted, capable, able to learn quickly, and confidently talk about subjects I was passionate about—which, to everyone's apparent annoyance, included mummification, Ancient Chinese antiquity, and pictographs used in languages across the world. The automatic assumption from those in authority was that I must have been lazy—unwilling to participate and prone to outbursts that no one could understand. (It was fluorescent lighting, by the way. I could hear it buzzing constantly, all day long, until it became the only thing I could focus on, and I had to turn the lights off in the classroom.) At that stage of development, I accepted my middle-school teachers' assessment: I must just be a problem and incapable of being 'normal.' It wasn't until much later in life that I discovered a term that seemed to fit my situation exactly: Asperger's. While the term has lost popularity, it was a lightbulb moment for me as I learned more about the ASD spectrum and connected with others who had similar experiences. All of this predated the TikTok stream constantly beaming the condition into pop psychology circles. I was completely on my own in identifying and seeking out this diagnosis. I did seek it out. I sat with doctor after doctor, explaining the string of connecting dots from childhood to adulthood—dots that even I didn't know had a common thread until recently. Eventually, a thoughtful and patient psychiatrist took the time to evaluate me and agreed with this realization in every possible way. To focus on the central question: How has my experience of disability influenced me? It took a long time to get here, and it didn't come easily. My perception of 'disability' changed because I realized there is no 'otherness' to it. Anyone can be, or may become, disabled. My passions and abilities began to shape my ambitions more than what used to hold me back. Now, based on my experience, I can recognize the inherent talent, worth, and dignity of every person I work beside. It's made me a champion for those who can't easily find the words to describe their experiences and invested in building a more accessible world through technology as a means of democratizing capability. It has shaped a core belief: When we are recognized and given the tools we need to succeed, we are all more than the sum of our limitations.

Teachers had a hard time understanding me. Overall, I seemed to enjoy learning: I was curious, I talked passionately about all my favorite subjects. I was thrilled to talk about the pyramids, how the Qin Dynasty in China was the first to see a unified nation, or how the Sumerians counted in base 60. But reading what I was assigned? No dice. I didn't connect with the books we were supposed to be reading in class. I didn't learn a profound lesson from how they treated Boo Radley, I didn't identify with Holden Caulfield's angsty monologues. Why did all of these metaphors somehow spark awe and wonder for people when they read poetry? I couldn't care less about how weird Ophelia was, I was more curious about the etymology of English words throughout the centuries. I had aphantasia all along. It's not that it was totally removed from me to be able imagine things, but they just didn't play out the way everyone else's ideas seemed to. I couldn't give the characters a face, I didn't care much for the description of their surroundings that authors seemed to spend so much time on. I just cared about information gathering and trying to follow what was happening in the plot of the story. Mainly just so that I could do the book review and move on with my day. This was my discovery of what it meant to have an invisible disability. To be experiencing something that's hard to describe to anyone who doesn't have the same happenstance. To go through the world thinking that everybody's brain is more or less the same, so our experiences of reality must be too. I have been proven so very wrong, many times over on that assumption. Aphantasia was the tip of iceberg for me (a metaphor that also didn't make sense to me until I was older). As it turned out, all of this time I'd had ADHD and was also on the spectrum. It wasn't just my brain that operated by a different owner's manual, it was the very fabric of my reality that diverged from what most people experience each and every day. Every experience I've had, every thing I'd been so passionate about that no one else seemed to care about, all of it was explained by a few diagnostic criteria on an assessment that I rightly should have had as a child but didn't until I was in my late 20s. My appreciation of these unknown factoids about myself can't be sold short: I experience life through a different set of filters than most. Not only is this true conceptually, it's also true of the senses that get processed in my physical reality -- loud for me is really loud, quiet rooms are abuzz with activity that people around me don't tend to flinch at when opening a door. My disabilities are multiplicitous... I have had these associations, I've been frequently persuaded to see disability as a crucial driver of paradigm shifts. What they have inspired in me, though, is a resolute desire to prove I am not /limited/. I am a whole person, capable of many more things than I am not. Holding this conviction at the height of my experience, I've managed to make it to grad school for Data Analytics. Data analytics constructs a different visual motif for profound change: it allows for taking what most people have a hard time seeing (data), and turnign it into a coherent image that is accessible to everyone.

My experience with mental health has pervaded my youth and has far-reaching impacts on my adult life. In my early teen years, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety -- the first labels that would be attached to me and how I felt in the world around me. The diagnosis wasn't particularly surprising to anyone, I had been a more reclusive, and sensitive child who was a particularly satisfying target for bullies. I was started on Celexa at 15 years old and when that didn't work: Zoloft. I transferred to a different high school and met a more diverse and inclusive friend group. At this point, the depression and anxiety seemed to melt away. When I left my hometown for college, I started to have episodes where my vision would black out and I felt like my heart was about to leap from my chest in this terrifying scene a la Guillermo Del Toro. It never did, thankfully, but it did earn me a new label: Panic disorder. Panic disorder? How far of a stretch is this from anxiety to 'panic'?! A terrifying disparity between the two, accordingly, because it got me on Zoloft and an endless 'as-needed' supply of Ativan. The years went on and the diagnoses accumulated. I returned home at 21 with my father in the hospital. At first, he was conscious and talking but by the time he was admitted into the ICU he was no longer conscious. The more time we spent in the hospital waiting for answers, the less we ended up having. The results finally came in from toxicology and it revealed that my father had died by suicide. At 63 years old, my father took a full bottle of Tylenol to end his life. A decade later, my niece followed by overdosing on fentanyl. A year after that, my sister did the same. I will never know, nor will I ever understand what went through their minds in the last moments of their lives. Were they thinking about everyone they left behind? Did they at some point, far too late in the process, happen to change their minds but couldn't? These are questions I am never going to have answers for, especially ones that will rationalize that tipping point. But it has guided me to a career that seeks out answers: Data analytics. Data gives answers to difficult questions. It doesn't lurk in the shadows of an intangible problem, it doesn't hide away in mystical references or allegories that are supposed to speak to the human condition. Data is transactional and it always leaves a record. Data won't give solace, but it can be used to prevent tragedies if we do our best to learn from it. The mental health industry and the healthcare industry as a whole need to learn from data. It is becoming conscious of the need for people like me to pour through the traces of data left behind in patient outcomes and try to discover the lessons right on the surface. I don't think that these industries have been intentionally malicious, I think they've suffered from the same human biases that all of us do: clouded judgement, avoiding pain, going down the path of least resistance. Data is impervious to these because its only measure is the magnitude and gravity of its transaction. If we can incorporate data into these sectors, I truly believe that we will improve the lives of those with mental illness when they need it most.

I will be the person that changes minds, preconceptions, and narrow ideas of what is possible with democratized and accessible information.

Statistics make my world go around. They're embedded in my work, they're embedded in the advice I give to friends, and they're even embedded in the way I try to live my life. It wasn't always such a passion but when I started to uncover the value of predicting outcomes based on past events, I was fascinated by just how profoundly useful they are. I work in data analytics and, surprisingly, not even many data analysts start their approach with math! There's a lot of really flashy dashboard creation tools, ways to manipulate data to lead to unique visuals that mean more to business users than numbers. But the core function of an analyst in my mind is to take raw data and turn it into deep insight. When I start on a data project, I stay away from computer programming languages to start. What I prefer to do is test the data with stastistical modeling and see where it ends up. Each step that these crude numbers take to get to deeper meaning can lead to an expanding path to information. We can even take the data that others have found, combine it with our own and find a new pattern of meaning that leads to greater inference. These combinations, aggregations, and models shape a view of the world that has never existed before. They can detect, with stunning accuracy, outcomes that no one has ever considered or possible solutions to problems that no one's been willing to try. That is a quality present in all branches of mathematics: to see a reality that we have a hard time perceiving. Numbers are able to define dimensions we can't experience or perceive, they're able to trace a lineage through antiquity through perspectives very unlike our own. They can even cross linguistic barriers and communicate without the same understanding of spoken words. That is why I love math. It's eloquent, it escapes from the boundaries of what we can see directly, and it expands our understanding in a way that we can confirm is true.

Easy: The Story Factor by Annette Simmons! Humans have always been story tellers. They've passed down traditions, raised new generations, and shaped entire societies. The spoken word has the ability to change our perspectives in ways we can't expect, to impart and retain knowledge that's hard to take onboard, and to shape the nature of our reality in a way beyond our senses. All of this can happen as a story takes us on an emotional journey or to a profound sense of experiencing something we've never even encountered. What sets a good storyteller apart from a novice is usually something that escapes most people. We have a tendency to think that we're somehow not creative enough or that we haven't had as much experience in life. In reality, the only thing that most of us lack is allowing ourselves the space to experiment along a semi-structured path. Annette Simmons captures this eloquently and in a way that makes being a storyteller as algorithmic as following a recipe. She sets the tone for the reader that the element that eludes us is repeated practice of key story elements can elevate people's communication, pursuasion, and inspire change. When I started reading this book, I wanted to see how I could use it to become a better data analyst. Data stories are a common technique that relates a nebulous concept like data to a direct experience of a person. We try to tell a story about how data can be used to paint a picture of efficiency or novelty for those that use it. Doing so takes a lot of convincing sometimes! How can a few statistics, a couple graphs, and maybe a map with little bubbles translate into direct experience? By talking about people and their lives along the axis that we've tracked and the patterns we describe! I don't just think that this is only true of data analytics, I think it's true of everything from banking to medicine. When we can connect to a story, we can connect the meaning to our lives. That turns a pretty boring investment portfolio, or medical trend into a message we remember. When we remember it in an embodied way, then we're more inclined to pass the story on to someone else.

My interest in cycling is a newfound love for cycling itself, the community, and the profound impact a community can have on social progress and supporting non-profits. I began cycling in early 2021 as training for a fundraising event along the coast of California. My partner had participated in this even for years before we met and had introduced me to the amazing people that promote, participate, and live to ensure the success of the agencies it supports. The charity bike ride that I'm referring to is AIDS/LifeCycle, a fully supported ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles that is done every year in benefit of the LA LGBT Center and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Even before I knew of this bike ride, I knew of the impact and the reach that these agencies have provided not just for Californians in need, but had been directly guided in my work as a frontline mental health worker and frontline health worker in patient outreach in Sudbury and then Toronto, Ontario, Canada. These two agencies have led the way in HIV/AIDS treatment, advocacy, research, and program development to the point that the standards they have set for testing, treating, and supporting people with HIV are applied as best practices around the world. Both Sudbury and Toronto cannot be any more different than San Francisco! It is freezing cold for half the year, not just in a San Francisco, "Oh, it's 50 degrees down in that part of town... bust out the winter jackets!" kind of way, but quite literally below freezing for most long, frigid nights. The populations that are served vary from largely Indigenous peoples, to the lingering impacts of de-institutionalized, privatized mental health care on the already most disenfranchised groups. Still, the tools developed by the SFAF have been instrumental in slowing the spread of HIV, applying pressure on governments thousands of miles away to fund innovative treatments, and advance the rights and preserve the dignity of everyone living with HIV. In short, I couldn't say no to biking 545 miles in the dead of summer! I'm exceedingly glad that this was the case because the community that it has introduced me to are people that I now call my chosen family. I have grown with them over the past 2 years, made friendships that will last a lifetime, and gained a passion for something I would have previously ascribed to having lost my mind. Now it's something I spend long stretches of the year training to participate in. Sadly, it also introduced me to the grim realities of road safety that I had never encountered before. There was nothing that drove these realities home more effectively than the loss of a teammate, Andy Jelmert, during a training ride in Griffith Park. Andy's partner, Andre, had counted his husband's time for that stretch down to the second. When Andy was struck and killed by a drunk driver, he was just 27 more seconds away from the end of his ride. This statement is forever burned into my mind. Whenever riders say to me 'I've done this X times' or 'it'll never happen', Andre's shaking voice, saying this number reverberates on an endless loop. Ultimately, there's no undoing this pain for him, but the community has demanded action that I stand in full support of: banning vehicles from strictly recreational spaces. It is a small, but decisive move by the municipality that I believe should be a first step forward in every single municipality.

My pursuit in the medical field is not a typical path, nor is it what many immediately associate with medicine, healthcare and health outcomes. However, in my 5 years working in this field, I have already helped shape community healthcare models in the public, non-profit sector, its standards, and its legislative framework. I've also helped develop core curriculum for Hospice Palliative Care training and certification for frontline healthcare practitioners, developed new communications systems for informing home healthcare agencies of patient admissions to hospitals, and helped spread new homecare models in several remote Northern communities. All of this came in part as a result of my data analysis on program outcomes, projected impact, and tools that I have developed. As a healthcare data analyst, I contributed to the long-term evaluation of programs and monitored for oversights along the way with in depth analysis of how and why people had been left behind. One of these interventions I developed was a risk assessment tools that takes pre-existing metrics from inter-RAI patient assessment tools and used them to evaluate patient risk, need for expanded services, and transitioning them to higher levels of care as they progressed through the continuum. This is just one small example of how data analytics can be and is being applied in healthcare environments. Long standing conversations about data-driven, and evidence-driven models of healthcare have often excluded diverse, but effective perspectives in their models because they lacked the popularity or the prestige of many more accessible and apparent models. Data analytics is a powerful tool in eliminating bias in healthcare delivery and driving truly evidence-based decisions. It doesn't consider prestige, the lobbyist driven talking points, industry incentivized treatment options, nor the emotional cues in assessing treatment methodologies. It is concerned at its core with the most effective treatments. In the most advanced applications, it doesn't even concern itself with the logical limits that we've superimposed onto health outcomes as individuals, with a well crafted model it will test seemingly illogical or disconnected parameters with ease and determine their likelihood to improve people's lives. Data and its newest technologies and applications is driving progress in all fields, across all sectors. It is already being used to discover new candidate drugs with higher accuracy and higher throughput than was ever thought possible. It's advancing genomics and proteomics by evaluating previously inconceivable amounts of data to show interactions that would have otherwise taken billions of dollars across decades to identify. My decision to seek further training is, in large part, to bring more advanced skills back to the field of healthcare analytics for roles that I will hold in the future. I am as resolute in remaining a part of advancing medicine through data, as I had been for the 5 years prior that originally brought me to this role. While it is true that there are many paths that I could take with analytics and data science application, my passion for evidence-based solutions remains firmly planted in directly improving people's lives. For me, there is no better path forward to achieve that end than by becoming the best data professional that I can and returning to healthcare to apply each and every lesson learned to improve patient outcomes.

Generational wealth has never been a reality for me. It's something that's inherited by people that don't talk like me, that don't look like me, and who don't tick the same boxes as I do. Even my own literal inheritance was written away by my father. He chose to remove me from his last will and testament because of who I am, at the age of 14 when I told him I was gay. My experience of it does not have positive associations. It's a bitter, preferential statement of who 'belonged' and who did not. There's a conscious shift that happens when I think of the legacy and the desire that I have for my future and the wealth that I will leave to my loved ones. My chosen family is extensive and I am the god-father to one of the smartest, most dedicated, hard working kids that I've ever encountered. My intention is to help her through her life as well as I can, and support her to achieve everything that she is capable of. For her, generational wealth will mean knowing that belonging isn't a commodity to trade or be lost. It will mean believing that unconditional love, support, and acceptance are more important than living up to any one person's expectations or vision of the person they want you to be. Generational wealth will be a final act of care, a final desire for her wellbeing, and an unwavering acknowledgement that she has always been deserving, always been 'enough'. I have started to plan this with a greater thoughtfulness of who I'll leave behind and the life I hope they'll live. Planning my career, I want to look for those employers that will support this vision with me and invest in the futures of the ones I love as much as they will for me. It's instilled a firm valuation in my mind of wage expectations, ability to invest in stable, long-term portfolios, and save money for the future whenever and wherever possible. Even if my experience of this idea has been tainted by the decisions and actions of others, I am still able to change that narrative for the benefit of the people I love. I can and will make a decision that seeks to balance that scale and leave behind a legacy of kindness, of love, and of devotion to those that I leave behind.

My musical taste has varied so widely over the years that asking my favorite genre of music comes down to what I'm feeling nostalgic for on any given day. I started listening to music that my peers liked in an effort to fit in in middle school: Limp Bizkit, Dr Dre, Eminem. It wasn't that I particularly liked them, but not liking them meant that I was the odd one out. In high school, I wanted to be the odd one out! It started with Evanescence and turned into hardcore death metal, operatic heavy metal, and the darkest of the dark metal I could find. So many shifts in tastes, attempts to find my people, and things that I just plain thought sounded cool came and went. One song emerged that still sits in my library and has for nearly 20 years: Proud, by Heather Small. This song started with unassuming flute solo on a TV show that I watched as a young gay man called 'Queer as Folk'. Admittedly, these grown men with very, very poor life choices don't qualify as role models in my wiser, older years. But, they were the only representation I got in a Jerry Springer and Maury Povich era where LGBTQ people were presented as a freak show. "What have you done today to make you feel proud?" In one line, this song became my anthem. It became my motto. It became an aspiration that I set for myself each and every day. I want to be proud each and every day, not because of what I am but because of the person I am. I have the ability to do things each day not just because of circumstance, but because I choose to do them. I make myself proud each and every day.

Athletics was a hard fought space for me. Growing up, I didn't find much room at the table for people like me. I wasn't popular, I wasn't particularly coordinated, and the majority of my attention was split between Pokemon and a fixation on Ancient Chinese society. Admittedly, Pokemon was pretty popular in my social circles up to the 5th and 6th grade. To my dismay, it suddenly became uncool as my peers around me started to inch closer to puberty. I was a year younger, having been skipped into grade 1 at 3 years old. Pokemon was out, girls, hockey, and baseball were in, and not a single soul in the 7th grade wanted to talk about the Qin dynasty! I hit that stage of adolescence a year later in grade 8. But, to absolutely no surprise to me, I still didn't have much to talk about with my peers. The only reason I was interested in hockey or baseball had almost nothing to do with the sport events and much more to do with the youthful, lean, attractive young men playing them -- and that only took my attention span so far when it came to sitting there and watching an entire game! I didn't feel like these spaces were mine to partake in. The people that did seem to participate in them certainly made no attempt to hide what they thought about people like me with taunting shouts of how people that weren't immediately good at these sports were emasculated, and lesser. One space really didn't seem to care who you were. It brought with it a philosophy that everyone is equal and that discipline, and training were the only qualifiers for becoming better. That space was in traditional martial arts like karate, judo, and jiu jitsu. I immersed myself in the codes of conduct and the philosophies that stood behind them: Sun Tzu, Bushido, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism. These systems of thought offered more promise than an inborn talent and being tough, macho, and the 'best in the game' had ever offered me or even invited me to feel safe entering. I went on to earn my black belt in Goju Kai Karate, integrated some judo and jiu jitsu into the practice, and even competed in local and regional sparring tournaments. As life became more busy and I moved away for studies, I lost touch with this community for a long time. Even without being in this community, I took a valuable lesson in sportsmanship from it that instructed my every decision, and my every action from then on out. In having found a space where identity was neither something to fear or to need to defend, I finally felt a sense of belonging that transcended a single piece of my personhood. The first lesson embedded in this experience was that giving up a stake in being the 'best' meant always becoming 'better'. Someone will always outrank or outmatch you in martial arts and it's never apparent based solely on appearances or any dimension outside of their level of training. The second lesson was in reverence of shared spaces, all people need to be welcome and all people have the responsibility be be welcoming. Where the shared goal is self-mastery, interpersonal differences aren't important, what is important is how we choose to respond to them. The most important lesson of all, though, is not to confuse a 'safe space' with an opportunity to be arrogant! Because someone will always outrank or outmatch you, and you may just get whooped!

One of my favorite childhood movies featured a scene of Leonardo Da Vinci coming upon a brutal fight against a closed door, examining the larger picture of the situation and finding a simple solution: take it off its hinges! He responded to his praise with, "Yes! I shall go down in history as the man who opened a door!" The relevance of this quote will become clear by the end of this essay. But first: Plastic... I absolutely hate plastic. From the socio-political forces that keep it omnipresent, to the substantial detriment that we've slowly absorbed it poses to our health and the health of ecosystems everywhere, I have grown to hate this substance. I truly believe that future generations will come to view our strange romance with this synthetic, fossil fuel intensive product the same way we look upon the past use of uranium in dinner plates and cosmetics! Plastic is everywhere! It delivers our water to us, it keeps our products shelf stable and protected from damage through the logistics-to-consumer pipeline. It's even used in actual pipeline! We trust this ultimately very unreliable, oft to go wrong, less than miraculous substance to carry its predecessor: crude oil -- with a long list of disastrous consequences for that misplaced trust. So, yes, I HATE plastic. It's become my personal mission in life as a conscientious consumer to avoid it at all costs! I began reducing my consumption of food that is packaged in plastic, opting for reusable bags for produce, no longer buying canned goods or frozen goods. I say reducing because it's an inconceivably difficult task to cut the world's addiction to a cheap, quasi reliable substance that all but promises to save money for someone if not everyone along the road from production-to-purchase. Sadly, it finds its way into everything from clothing to furniture, somehow flying in the face of the massive islands of it floating in our oceans, the toxic impacts of it bleeding into our food and the entire food chain. I have chosen to try my best at avoiding it in every way that I can as an intentional decision to break my dependency as a consumer and make the world just a little bit better in my dollar-weighted vote. Plastics are one symptom of a greater disregard for the intimately connected web of human, animal, and environmental health. This penchant for avoiding plastic has led me to a greater shift consciousness surrounding my own consumer behavior. Tracing values I hold for our planet, our health, and the health of all sentient life on this planet, it leads to approaches that consider all of these factors as one and the same overarching state of well-being. This conceptualization led me to discover the One Health approach and the UN's Social Development Goals. Not only have I grown to try and embody this approach in my personal life, it's something that I've adopted into my career pursuits as a Data Analyst. Sometimes these solutions end up being so simple to execute that it's hard to believe we had ever done things any differently! For example, a simple question that began with stabilizing the health of bee colonies led to the use of hedgerows in commercial farming that maintained soil biodiversity, increased the health of bird populations, prevented cancer in the surrounding human population, and, yes, saved the bees! I want to go down in history as the man that opened several doors. I want to make a long, impactful career out of finding simple solutions to complex issues, one day maybe even my mortal enemy: Plastic.

My father was an addict. It's not an unexpected reality for so many people living with bipolar disorder, but it wasn't something that my mother was willing to expose me to. After a long, abusive relationship with him, she bravely stepped out of this environment to benefit us both. Over time, my father recovered, then stumbled. His mental illness was unpredictable and largely untreated. Ultimately, he passed away from a suspected, self-inflicted overdose of Tylenol. Others in my family suffered from their own mental health issues, though none ever were diagnosed or treated. It became something riddled with stigma, something that was never discussed as a day-to-day experience for anyone. It was always something that needed to be ridiculed, treated as a personal failing, or 'snapped out of'. The way my family approached and interpreted mental illness had a profound effect on me. For much of my life, I felt as though many aspects of my personality were out of sync with my peers. It didn't seem to impact me very much other than a perpetual tendency toward exhaustion and self-isolation. This seemed normal to me though, after all, the adults around me all had a tendency to do the same when things got a little too intense in life. What struck me, though, was that my need for this alone time seemed to exceed other people's. I accepted it for what it was and seemed to embody this sense of 'shyness' or introversion as just an extension of my personality. In my early adult life, it started to become more apparent that there was a disconnect. My peers all seemed to float into job interviews, landing new opportunities with ease. I never seemed to share that experience! It was always so anxiety inducing that I would spend the entire day ruminating over possibilities that hadn't happened yet, trying to script every possible direction the conversation could take. My friends kept telling me to 'stop freaking out', it's just a job interview! There's nothing complicated, just answer the questions! But something inside of me just couldn't shift into that headspace. These personal challenges persisted for most of my formative, early adult years. Finally, I had reached a point of burn out and personal exhaustion that I needed to take action. I spent the better half of a decade visiting doctors' offices. Depression, anxiety, agoraphobia, panic disorder -- I seemed to have every mood disorder operating all at once. After nearly a decade of trying, my diagnoses, their treatments, and the persistence of my symptoms just weren't adding up. I deep dove into studying these conditions, entered in to my local community college to study social work and counselling. All the while my family, rather tacitly, endured my many lectures on my theories about what diagnosis I felt fit better. After all, I had endured their many disgruntled conversations about 'crazy people', and scapegoating the many people that didn't fit the apparent category of 'normal' , so why shouldn't they sit through my Ted Talks? Learning to be my own health advocate was a hard fought victory. After numerous blood panels to check everything from my thyroid, to vitamin levels, to underlying autoimmunity, losing 40 pounds after being told it was my weight, a sleep study, a test for parasites, and finally a referral to a psychiatrist, I finally got my answer. I was formally assessed and found to have ADHD, and am on the autism spectrum. Had it not been for stigma and avoidance that I imbibed surrounding invisible disabilities, I believe that my answer would have come much sooner.

It's been a long journey for me to understand the value of my own mental health. Growing up with family members that had long since experienced mental illness before I entered the equation, I knew mental health was a factor in almost every decision around me. I couldn't connect these dots at 2 years old, but I knew there were important distinctions between how someone felt and the way that they inevitably made choices that impacted my world with them in it. It wasn't until much later that I understood the relevance in my own day-to-day life when in my teen years, something was coming up in me that I couldn't rationalize or understand. I'd always been different in a number of ways, knowing that I was gay from 8 years old upward, and then much later in adulthood finding out that I am on the Autism spectrum seemed to weave its way through so many of my experiences that it all just made perfect sense. But something else was happening along side these well established differences in my life: I was absolutely terrified and I had no idea why. My mouth would go dry, my heart would be racing. I would feel this faintness creeping in as the world around me started to go dark at the peripheries and I would have the imminent impending doom where the only clear thought echoing in my mind was, "I think I might be dying". My first panic attack was obvious to everyone else in my grade 10 drama class but me. Everyone could see that something horrific was happening in my mind, but I just sat there aggressively dismissing any single statement from any single person that tried to check in with me. I spent so long after this event refusing to accept that something was happening in my experience that was above my ability to fix for myself. So much so that I ended up skipping school routinely, in fact, nearly every single day from then on out. My mom received a phone call from a truancy officer explaining the predicament and by lunch period the vice principal was calling my personal cell phone to tell me that I was being expelled for the rest of the semester, but that I could re-enroll in the spring. I don't know why this was such an impactful experience for me, whether it was letting down my mom, or the first vice-principal I'd ever had who seemed to actually care about my success as a student. In either case, it set off a chain reaction that even I couldn't have predicted. In my community, a program had been set up for students struggling with conventional approaches to high school education through a local college. I took it upon myself to register there, access the many resources available at the college and finish on time, with an acceptance to a college program thereafter. It was from this point forward and my subsequent enrollment in the college's Social Work program that I unraveled some of my experiences into coherent, definitive values for mental wellness. Today, this mental wellness incorporates mindfulness techniques, self-compassion, and strong adherence to routines. I am most functional when I'm in the moment, I'm happiest when I forgive my mistakes, and I am healthiest when my body's needs are consistently met. My experiences have grown into resilience instead of regret, and the lessons I've learned continue to inform my progress in new ways along the way.

My experience in volunteerism began with teaching youth martial arts. I began teaching both Goju Kai Karate and Judo when I was 14 years old. I was very young when I began practicing and the school had a policy of blackbelts needing to be over 18. I continued teaching until I moved away for my first round of college at 19, but continued with volunteering well beyond that. When I was in my first year of college, I became a part of a local homelessness network for my first year social work practicum. The organization itself was established as a shelter for adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16, but it also operated an outreach program for distributing socks, clothing, and personal care items to those experiencing housing insecurity. I walked the downtown streets of my community every night from 7 pm to 11 pm helping in a small way to have a profound impact. Even with the public health infrastructure in Canada being free of upfront service fees, the reality of most that lacked a physical address was that they could never maintain access to vital health services. Making matters worse, going from location to location on foot all day led to chronically wet socks. It had never occurred to me before this experience that a simple solution like a new pair of socks could make or break an outcome like severe skin breakdown, opportunistic infections, and acute, life-threatening sepsis. This was the first in a long line of social service roles that taught me how seemingly small interventions could amount to significant changes somewhere down the line. I moved from here to administrating a rent bank program aimed at preventing homelessness and utility cut offs. I later worked as a sexual health counselor for individuals newly diagnosed with HIV. I moved on to mental health counseling and to front-line healthcare thereafter. The profoundness of this lesson has never escaped me even as I've transitioned to different careers in administration, finance, and ultimately to data analytics. I recognize that effecting significant change from person to person can be as simple as a conversation at first, but somehow lead to helping someone find housing, go to college, and build a happy loving home. These stories are often lost in statistics, especially those concerned with measuring only the worst of all possibilities as a barometer for our success as communities, neighborhoods, and even as nations. Buried just beneath the surface are these unique experiences that are stories inherently meant to be told -- stories about how a pair of socks led to a college education or stories about a person being a shoulder to cry on after the worst news in someone's life led to a passionate advocate for people living with HIV. The difference between how these stories unfold can be just one unlikely, but meaningful link between possible outcomes. Far too often, these links don't receive the attention that they deserve because they don't feature as highly based on their raw, unexplored values in summary statistics. Where I hope to act as a bridge as a future data analyst is in finding these unlikely solutions to complicated problems. I want to be the storyteller of mountainous bodies of raw data, uncover these hidden links just beneath the surface, and lead to small systematic changes capable of altering people's lives. I want to take a lesson learned from handing out socks and being a safe person to cry with and apply them everywhere I go.

Recovery is the sum of every active decision for each and every action. It's the difference between tacitly accepting decisions that work against me, but that might feel like the least amount of resistance in the moment, or ones that work for me, but that might feel like they drain the life out of me. It's the net difference between where I've been at different points in my life, versus where I am now. One of the most crucial tools I've developed as a result of it has been the ability to reflect on where I've been in the past, what's guided me to my present, and what will sustain me in heading toward where I want to be in the future. If recovery is my journey, reflectivity has been my most trustworthy vehicle, self-awareness has been its engine, and my goals have been its fuel.

As a kid growing up, I faced a number of challenges that didn't seem to make sense. I knew that I had a place in the social order that I occupied, but I never seemed to understand what it was that made my reflection seem out of place. I knew that someone was there, looking back at me, that was somehow certain of who 'I' was. I just didn't understand how people looked in my direction and saw someone that was somehow lesser because of what they perceived of my innermost nature. I consciously decided to try to be more like my peers, pretending that I was completely over the "phase" that made me different from them in almost every perceivable way. I stopped being that third grader that talked incessantly about learning Egyptian hieroglyphics. I hid the somehow dirty secret of being a 5th grader who privately checked out 10 new books a week from the public library -- not from the kid's section, no, I didn't have time for that! The person these awe inspiring stories inspired got locked away deep inside, and hidden behind a mask. My life story connected me to Disney's representation of Mulan in so many ways that I would sit in my room on weekends watching it back to back, rewinding my first edition VHS copy to the point of wearing it out! Discovering that Mulan was a historic figure in Chinese culture led me to absorb as much as I could. I started out a journey to learn Chinese philosophy, I immersed myself in the history and customs of this distant land with a completely different set of customs and norms. It led me to Buddhism's central tenets of accepting ourselves exactly as we are with boundless loving kindness. That's what I learned to do for myself, a young boy, knowing I was gay at 8 years as well being someone undiagnosed as on the Autism Spectrum until decades later. The inadvertent but fateful exposure to and identification with Mulan started me on a path of radical self-acceptance. I lacked the language to describe my experience back then, but seeing someone, out there that seemed to share in these struggles of pretending to be someone that we weren't. Just like Mulan, I also discovered that everyone closest to me loved me all along for exactly who I am.

The most impactful way of combatting climate change is global accountability. The vast disparity between consumer activity and the offset required to effect meaningful change must finally acknowledge that the international community has a fundamental role in changing production, logistics, and energy delivery that feeds back into the consumer market. If each of these systems are incapable of changing, the ability for individuals to measurably alter our trajectory will never reach the levels needed to protect even our local biomes. The means of achieving this level of accountability is being demonstrated each and every day in One Health approaches to what appear to be insurmountable problems. By incorporating holistic images of these problems that consider the impact on human, animal, and environmental health into every facet of corporate sustainability, there is no choice but to act with total accountability for these outcomes. We are witnessing a revolution in data science that achieves this aim in activities and their outcomes that we've never been able to conceptually connect. One area where this is most directly correlated is in the sustainability of the human food chain, the depletion of endemic plant species, and a connection between the birds and the bees. At no point in history have we previously been able to connect the factors of monocrop farming, loss of habitat for bird species, and the health of pollinator species. More recently, a set of studies integrating data analysis and machine learning into health outcomes at each of these levels point to solutions of hedgerows, protection of native species, and how protecting birds that sustain fruiting plants leads to increased bee colony health, less human exposure to aerosolized pesticide, and sustaining soil microbiomes for long-term health of industrial farmlands. All of these seemingly disconnected elements are interwoven in intimate and profound ways and there are more of these connections being made that will ultimately lead to sustainability for commercial markets, and environmental protection. There are leaps in understanding our planet with data-driven solutions that are translating to global shifts, for instance, who could predict that monitoring of avian populations in the Midwest United States would translate into innovative networks for combatting poaching in Sub-Saharan Africa? The intersection isn't political, it isn't solely corporate policy nor domestic legislative process. It doesn't stem from a singular focus in coal, fossil fuels, or preserving specific ecosystems. These solutions stem from Big Data and subsequently constructing coherent, universal, statistical models. This is the world that I am entering as a data analyst. It's become something I am completely enmeshed in as a data practitioner. Using data to support decisions in real-time has become my obsession after coming to fully understand the depth and breadth of information that can be passed through a trained machine learning algorithm. Where models apparent to humans and traditionally allowed in logical applications, constrained by laws of probability, computers tend not to be concerned with the time it takes to make these calculations. Artificial intelligence doesn't mind exploring touchy subjects, it doesn't judge our cultures, social hierarchies, or emotional dissonances, it doesn't run out of energy or desire to answer our sometimes silly or obvious questions. Instead, trained AI acts as a patient, eager, and benevolent guide through insurmountable complexity. It's through the development and training of these models that I truly believe I will make my greatest impact. I want to train these computerized, sagely interpreters of Big Data so that they will begin informing every element of our activity on this planet and propel us into a future of immense connectedness with the health of our planet.

Mental illness has been omnipresent in my life. I knew the face of bipolar disorder in my father and my sister. I knew the face of anxiety in my mother and my grandmother. I knew the face of depression in my step-father, my friends who lost their lives to it, and in myself. It's been at the root of so many of my experiences that I almost had no concept of it not existing for everyone. From the earliest memory I have of the word 'depressed', I've been able to associate it with the many faces that have come to represent it etched so deeply into my mind that it's as simple an image to visualize as an item on a grocery list. I can see the couch sagging sagging beneath a person, frozen, unable to move, not because they don't want to in some vague intellectual space but because their minds and bodies have made the entire idea of moving such a heavy, inconceivable amount of effort that it's just not worth the strain. That overwhelming heaviness has sat on my chest too, dead center, refusing to move. It sat there continuously for the final 2 years of my undergraduate degree while the world I knew around me fell apart. It led my experience through an abusive relationship, a vitriolic divorce, and a long time after as I tried to reconstruct the person that existed without these addendums to my identity. I always held on to this belief that I was smarter, more resilient, and didn't need professional help dealing with these things. After all, who can possibly understand what it's like to grow up with these things and have to be self-sufficient from a very young age? What could anyone else possibly add to that context? As it turns out, I discovered that what professionals do add to my context could end up saving my life. Just 3 short years ago, I found myself in the depths of a mental landscape where everywhere I looked in myself was toxic and tainted. I believed that my life had reached a point of no return and that there was no conceivable reason to go on. Several times a day I would find myself slipping into these mental montages of watching my life end in horrific ways, all at my own hand. These snippets would roll through my head like film strips from Hell and there was no way for me to pause them or change the movie. They just played there in the background as if someone else had taken control of that part of my brain and made it their singular focus to crush me under the weight of these painful flickers of experience. What was more terrifying than these intrusive thoughts themselves was reaching the point that they weren't scary or painful anymore. There came a point where these thoughts started to feel like relieving and like an escape from my day-to-day life that I knew that I was finally over my own threshold for managing my own mind. Yes, I'd been a great custodian of my own existence to this point. No, it wasn't my fault that these things were happening. But it clearly didn't make a difference if I preserved my ego at this point because there wouldn't be an ego left to defend pretty soon if I didn't get immediate help. I reached out to a therapist and set an appointment time, I agreed that life would go on until I could take that appointment in a pact with some part of me that was still lucid enough to be sounding the alarms. The next 8 months of therapy weren't meant to shake the very foundation of my world, they were just supposed to keep me alive long enough to snap out of this weird, detached, internal horror story. To my surprise, my foundation was shook and I stand in gratitude of that fact every single day. As I stand here having left this life behind in March of 2021, on the other side of this hazy memory that doesn't even register as my life, I live in a different country, with a loving, healthy, respectful spouse, and am now completing my master's degree in data analytics. It's in a deep reflection on the difference between these two points in my life that I can pinpoint the shift in my values, and beliefs on mental health. I now know that therapy is something every single person should have access to exactly when they need them most. I believe that mental health is a foundational need for ontological security, for achieving the most out of life, and finding our way to the people that enrich our experience more than we've ever known. I could have taken my life 2 years ago; I didn't...

From the outset, I think many people will be inclined to say that 'legacy' is passed down to you. I believe that people will picture their relatives and their ancestors having passed down culture, language, beliefs, and teachings for a better life. That's a form of legacy that I have never known. Instead, legacy for me has always been encapsulated in observing who I am and who I can be in reference to my surroundings. I grew up in a small, northern community with what I always thought was the antithesis of diversity. There were three, broad heterogenous groups that didn't seem to mix and mingle and each held a view of the other that left the culture oddly strained. My groups were assigned to me split neatly down the middle in that my mother's family didn't want to talk about it because the past was in the past, and my father didn't want to talk about it because the staunch reality of our background was riddled with guilt, shame, and lingering impact of genocide. An unfortunate reality that I later discovered was also true of my mother's not-so-British as originally claimed heritage. My father was Métis-Cree, a historic community that didn't belong to anyone. That was until Residential Schools in Canada saw them attend the same horrific classrooms as other First Nations people. My father, though he never talked about this period of his life, ran away from a Catholic Residential School when he was 8 years old. In that moment, he ended his formal education and sought entry into the workforce soon after. He would always recount the day he left school as a humorous anecdote of jumping on the back of a horse-drawn wagon and falling to the ground, hitting the ground face first, and needing dentures at 8 years old; he found this story hilarious, and I found it absolutely terrifying! My mother's family fled Germany at the onset of the first World War to become ambiguously 'Ukrainian'. It was a moniker that changed later in World War II as my family spontaneously became 'British'. My Great-Grandfather spoke 5 languages: English, Ukrainian, German, Greek, and Yiddish. "Yiddish"?! I could never understand this connection as a child and my persistence in asking was usually met with a sudden hush. My former-mother-in-law undertook this mystery as an amateur genealogist to uncover how my family abandoned everything in Germany, some to flee to the Netherlands and others to flee to Ukraine. She traced a long line of Rabbis back to the 74th high-priest of Israel. Neither of these identities written in every cell in my body tangibly belong to me. I feel a strange attachment and detachment both of them at the exact same moment. I have no stories of what it is to be Jewish nor Indigenous, but I know what it is to witness a legacy of colonialism, oppression, and genocide. The void that I feel in looking into my past is something that fills me with empathy for the struggles of others. It has guided me to seek always seek out authenticity in my identity to take the place of this void. In this way, I have become a person that constantly pushes for reclamation, for empowerment, and for always maintaining identity in the face of adversity. Knowing who we are in reference to the world around us is our legacy. It's a powerful tool for understanding how disjointed parts of history, experience, and identity fit into our situated contexts. I may never fully know my lineage, but I will always know and live its legacy.

Common accepted and social norms of civil discourse are a double edged sword. While the first reading of this points to the context of bullying, harassment, and discriminatory behavior of those in the online community, it ignores how these platforms have opened a channel for those that challenge the conventional by virtue of their sheer existence. Online gaming communities are plagued by a more prominent, and simpler problem: trolling. It is reinforced by a lack of consequences present in being able to say and do whatever one wants with relative impunity exists well beyond the Matryoshka doll that is a forum online on the topic of video gaming. These discords and algorithm driven silos have become a much more pervasive part of our day than harkens back to the 4Chan days where internet trolls could mobilize for the worst possible reasons. Instead, we have people actively engaged in the lingering impacts of psychological warfare online. Having swayed an entire election by way of memes, misinformation, hacking, and artificially manipulating social media algorithms to take people deeper into ill informed deep dives, we can certainly conclude that the impact has gone well beyond bullies online. The confrontation to this and the antithesis that we should strive to cement, support, and encourage is the opportunity to live authentically. Those who typically exist outside the narrow hallways of 'social norms' and established civil discourse are an ever increasing and allied group of people that have had no say in the matter. The neurodivergent, the gender non-conforming, the marginalized, and those whose existences have been long cut off from having a one-size-fits-all modus operandi all use these platforms to finally connect with others like them. Anonymity gives them the ability to do so openly, with impunity from dropping their masking behaviors that they use as a performance piece in 'normative' circles. As an LGBTQ individual on the spectrum, it's certainly been where I've found a good part of my 'tribe', so to speak. Reluctantly, I do concede that these forums are at a critical impasse: do we allow people the satisfaction of bullying on the go with little consequence? There is still a usefulness for the very same attribute that spurs low-brow abusiveness: anonymity. Many platforms have tried to contend with trolling and lost. I have myself been banned from social media for a week for using the word 'potato' while receiving word back from these feckless algorithms that threatening to kill transgender people with a shooting brigade is perfectly acceptable. Anonymity drives actions that would normally be condemned, but it also drives positive, loving communities that would also be condemned.

I've known that I am gay since the third grade. At this time, it was the mid-1990s and the public image of gay men had been influenced by the freakishness of daytime talk show hosts. I was given a constant stream of scandalous cheating husbands and their secret gay lovers, guessing who on stage was a 'real woman', and the later tragedy of Matthew Shepard tied to a fence and left for dead. These images, compounded by the HIV/AIDS pandemic left me with a grave vision of what being gay meant: being a spectacle, being a scandal, or becoming a tragedy. Despite all of this, I discovered very early on that I wasn't ashamed of being who I was but that I was terrified of where it would lead me. I entered high school at 13 years old, a year ahead of my peers where I tried to blend into the background with all my might. My stealthy evasion of all things social was a perfect success, after all, who but me was hanging out in the library reading Asian philosophy books? Just me and the overworked high school librarian who sometimes acknowledged my existence, sometimes not; I couldn't have asked for a better arrangement at the time. Then it happened, I said three words and my life changed, "I am gay." I didn't even expect to say these words! A girl in my first-period, grade 10 history class confessed that she liked me and that she wanted to date me. I tried to hush the words as they left my mouth but beet red face and neck muscles tightening sent a shot of adrenaline through my system knowing that she was about to yell at the top of her lungs. I braced for impact as the words left her mouth, "OF COURSE YOU'RE GAY, GOD, WHAT THE HELL IS IT WITH ME?! COME WITH ME, NOW!" I couldn't turn my head to see who else was looking at us but I knew that I was now the 'resident gay' of the entire high school, a fact later proven when by lunch period I'd been asked by a dozen people I'd never met if it was true. The girl, Charlotte, led me down to the math wing and sat me down with a group of strangers, pushed me forward, and said exasperated, "This is Devon, he's one of you." This was the start of my coming out process. I came out to my mother, who gracefully stated "I don't care that you're gay, you still have a curfew." Then my less supporting father tried to offer psychiatry. The next day, he proceeded to his lawyer's office to write me out of his will, severed ties, and only sparsely initiated contact. My father passed away when I was 21, never actually informing me of his decision to disown me, instead, I discovered that I was simply excluded from the will after his passing. The person that I want to be is a direct result of my passive observation of untruths, of misrepresentation of LGBTQ people. I am driven, above all else, by the desire to confront misinformation in all forms. As a future data scientist, currently studying computer science and software engineering, I plan to enter into health research and speak the truth to others. I've never been an outspoken advocate and I don't expect that I will ever be the figurehead of a movement. Still, in my way, I am fighting falsehoods perpetrated upon our community by searching for and presenting data-driven, evidence-based truths.

Superfoods saved my life. I know that's a dramatic way to begin this story but it's a certifiable fact! I entered into the prime of my adult years with a lot of physical and mental stress. I've come to learn that my body was trying to tell me that my lifestyle was out of sync with my biology but at the time, I was blissfully unaware of what was happening. When I started to get chest pains, I grew more and more concerned that I was headed down a familiar, hereditary path of diabetes, heart disease, and maybe even another major family risk: cancer. I made a conscious choice to change my life by going more plant-based, incorporating around 70% of my diet with nutrient-dense, low-calorie, satisfying foods. I loaded my diet with leafy greens: kale, spinach, mustard greens, and so many other delicious greens that I'd never tried before. I swapped out fast food and hidden trans fat for healthy fats from seeds, nuts, and olives. Possibly my greatest weakness was sour gummy candies! I dove head first into exploring varieties of fruit that I'd never tried before and some different combinations of superfood trail mixes for snacks instead. Before starting this exploration into food, my blood pressure was 140/110, I was pre-diabetic with recurring periods of dangerous hypoglycemia that left me exhausted, with a size 36 (going on 38) waistline, maxed out at 258 lbs, and I had the cardio endurance of a 70-year-old man, all at 26 years old. After this journey, I am a textbook 120/80 almost every time, dipped down to the lowest weight of my adult life at 196 with 12% body fat, and had shifted my entire trajectory toward a healthy balanced lifestyle. I owe so much of this progress to my diet and the incorporation of superfoods into a highly nutrient-dense, lower-calorie intake. Incorporating this diet into my recovery wasn't a matter of dedication or repression though! I feel like so many people have this concept that healthy, nutritious diets have to be arduously painstaking and it couldn't be further from the truth! Real foods, the kind that leaves you feeling energized, satisfied, and ready to take on the day are some of the most delicious things I've ever encountered! I've learned to make everything from delicious, veggie-dense Thai food to protein-packed brownies with black beans. The discovery that I've made is that making conscious choices about your food makes it rewarding, and fun, and even reconnects us to the social aspects of food that we've lost in fast food culture. Making my diet an area for play and connectedness with other people in my life has been one of the most rewarding parts of this entire process for me. Not only have I given myself more time to be with the ones I love, but I've also made the kitchen a place where we can bond with one another, share, and love our lives together.