The label 'woman' always felt like an ill-fitted shoe. I felt restricted by womanhood as a child, and uncomfortable with the social expectations that came along with it. TV in the early 2000s was littered with mini skirts and sensual dances performed by women. The younger girls on TV were all glitter and sequenced skirts, the younger facsimile of the older pop star. She could be vibrant and preppy but never anything outside of that. Going to school often made these expectations more visible. Among my cishet peers, a girl who did not dress or 'act' like one was a social outcast. I found myself alone throughout most of my public school experience from elementary to high school. It did not help that I was already facing racial prejudice, as the brown child of two Mexican immigrants. This isn't to say I always felt a sense of disquiet in performing femininity. I liked frilly clothes just as much as I liked snap-backs and knee-length shorts. To me, gender always felt like a costume, something I could change or decorate as I pleased. Others visibly did not like this aspect of my identity. My own family was disturbed by my refusal to cave into their conservative gender standards. Getting dressed for school was something that became an arduous process for my mental health and my idea of self-image. It was also hard to stay motivated for school when I was getting harassed left and right. At ten years old, I was receiving rape threats from one of the boys in my class. Unfortunately for me, he was my desk partner, and we had the type of teacher who would pair bullies with quiet 'girls' in the hopes they could quell his harmful attitude. He'd frequently call me an ugly girl and never failed to remind me how lucky I was for having his attention despite my boyish appearance. This set the tone for the following school years. I was consistently confused, battling between my ideas of feminity and masculinity, which made it hard to tell where I fell on the gender spectrum when I felt like both, none, and only one at times. The boys my age seemed just as confused in approaching me. I avoided dating, and a lot of other expected teenage experiences. Even the non-romantic relationships with my other peers and teachers felt stilted. By all accounts, it seemed a barrier -caused by my inability to be sure of myself- kept me separate from those around me. I felt uninspired by almost everything, directionless, and restricted by my social background. This all changed when I found my outlet in art. Drawing had always been just a hobby to get me by through class. No one I knew found an education in art all that impressive, or something to aspire growth in. But I could feel the temptation at the back of my head, waiting for me to tap into its potential. I gave in at last in the last two years of high school. I was happy, learning the basics of drawing, painting, and story-creating. Eventually, through a lot of hard work, scholarships, and the support of my working-class mother, I was able to attend Rhode Island School of Design. My education in art gave voice to my genderfluid expression, allowing me to draw characters with my identity, or create abstract renditions of my experience. As an artist, I want to contribute a visual space in which people like me can exist, free of prejudice, and free to look in and feel seen.

My journey started off with a sticky yellow notepad. Mom used to bring my sister and I to her work on the days she couldn't afford a babysitter. The office had a plethora of sticky notes, and on these notepads, I would spend hours drawing and making short flipbook animations. I was fascinated with the concept of bringing characters to life. Watching my creations stretch, or jump, and walk filled my childhood with a sense of accomplishment and joy. I graduated from sticky notepads to printer paper. Here I would layout what I'd learned from comic artists and mangaka on Youtube, and facilitated my own comic ideas and characters within the ruler-drawn frames. The projects would carry out for weeks on end. I drew stories about children with superpowers, gadgets, costumes, and who could overcome any obstacle that came their way. It was a form of escapism from my otherwise mundane life. In my comics, the child superhero didn't have to worry about poverty, she could simply fly away to a new adventure, enriched by her experiences. These story ideas motivated me into creating several art accounts for online audiences in my teen years. My mother had just had another baby, and because she was a working single mother, she needed me to stay home to take care of my youngest sister. I'd learned to balance the art of preparing milk bottles, sketching ideas, changing diapers, planning storyboards, rocking the baby, and responding to online art feedback all in two years. Once my sister was old enough to understand what I did, she too would join me on my drawing endeavours. She loved requesting ideas and watching me bring her imagination to life. I grew very fond of watching her reactions. The online sphere was also very encouraging of my comics, I even got to see some youtubers voice act for the short stories I had drawn. This brought the realization that I was passionate about entertaining people with my art. There formed my dream of going to art school with the hopes of one day working in the art industry. To do this, however, I would have to start reattending school. The missed absences and poor grades seemed daunting at first. I began slowly acclimating school back into my daily life. I'd wait for my mom to switch baby rearing shifts with me so that I could run two miles down to catch my last class, which was my AP Art Class. There I would put most of my efforts. Eventually I was able to make up my absences and also brought up my grades in my other classes enough for me to apply to art school. In the late months of my high-school senior year I recieved my acceptance letter from Rhode Island School of Design. I recall my mother and I crying into each other's arms. It seemed both the hardships we'd gone through and efforts we employed finally paid off. Once in college, I could properly put a name to the art career that best fitted my interests. Storyboard art is a perfect blend of story planning, character expression, and action sequence. It forms the layout for which any production, from TV, comic, movies, or animation, all fall back on. I want to continue inspiring and drawing emotional reactions from broader audiences. The dream of one day going into storyboarding and then directing my own animated show is what prompts me to continue my development at art school. Though my mother and I still struggle with tuition costs, I am determined to finish my college education.

An emblem of stability and buoyancy is what I will obtain. I want a life that breeds adventure and rich experiences at every turn, a life where I can make people content and keep them inspired so as to keep them going, to hold on despite any incoming travesties. My focus has always been on the encouraging and fantastical. No one wants mediocrity or to be held down by things like racial, gender, and class divides, which has been the unfortunate undoing of many dreamers and their aspirations. For years I've been chased by phantasm and the yearning for something that transcends my physical body and ideals, I want to leave people touched and yearning for more, teach them that there is never any valid reason to settle or cave to social standards and pressures regardless of whatever background they grew up with. Barriers like money and multitudes of materialism have coveted horrors across various margins and fields. I grew up with an underpaid single mother and watched my mentally ill father become homeless. My own battle with poverty under their care has nearly broken me at times, but my aspirations have only become more concrete. I was the first Mexican American child in my family to graduate high school and make it to college, a feat I was only able to do because of my experiences and my stubborn refusal to cave to class and racial hurdles. Every step thus far has been to make my parent's sacrifices worth it, my next step lies within what I can create to bring my dream to fruition, to create haven for those like the younger me who only needed to felt heard to keep going forward.

At first glance Emil Melmoth's ''Arcane XII (Transfiguration)"[2018] looks every bit the horror-esque masterpiece its namesake implies. It's cut-throat, and to the point, from the sculpture's slumping neck, to the grotesque seemingly decaying skull, and appendage erupting from its left side, one derives an emotional abundance of 'giving in' and 'becoming'. I've always been attracted to the idea of otherness, the concept that I can at any point destroy my foundations and remake myself from my hollow parts, like Melmoth’s sculpture, I can simply exist as epoxy clay and varnished wood. Furthermore, this sculpture touches the root of my life philosophy, that to 'become', I must give into the metaphysical destruction of myself to remake a new skin and bodily infrastructure. Ultimately, this macabre work titulates a fundamental human value, transformation and the new, thus citing the Death Arcana Tarot card. Lives ridden with bell curves and skeletons hidden in closets is something my own is not above of. I centered myself around my mental instability and wrought self inflicted pain in an attempt to get better. It produced mixed results, unhealthy coping and ill indulgences have overall wrecked my past scholastic successes but elevated my passion for art. Arcane XII does the same; the closed-eyed figure reminds me I have much to lament and dwell on, but that I am not a product of my mental illness, it’s only a whispering influence now tamed, as the ugly innards finally escape the sculpture’s figure, I parallel its hopefulness. I’ve acclimated to my healthier life, like Arcane XIII, the death of the old paves way to a lineage of hopeful artistic endeavors. I aim to recreate this art’s bittersweet message through my artistic career and help it reach those in need of it.