Painting My Roses Red I often find myself painting my roses red Hoping to cover up the lack of color with something so bright It reminds us of courage, and I paint courage on the cowardly white With a determination and hope that someday I will be instead Radiant, ravishing, romantically, red But I'm beginning to learn that I was never painting with paint But with my own blood The release the thorns provided me never seemed to hurt Because it hurts less to kill the exterior than the inside I would prefer to be pricked by thorns than leave the roses white My roses represent attempted perfection My trials, mostly ending in failure, impressionable I draw more from my veins to impress the unimpressible What falls from my skin suppresses a want To be spotless, flawless, wanted, and calm I have painted with my blood for years now And I´m feeling weaker than ever before They think this painting doesn’t leave me increasingly sore They have watched me slowly die at their feet in a desperate attempt To be courageous, to be bloodier, to be perfect, to be red.

This character is not my favorite because they're a good person; they're my favorite because they represent a very real type of person. One that is manipulative, selfish, possessive, and cruel. My favorite Disney character is Mother Gothel from Rapunzel. I am no expert in psychology, but Mother Gothel in my opinion demonstrates textbook narcissism in mothers. One trait I would like to discuss is the constant lies she tells Rapunzel, who she kidnapped as a baby. Mother Gothel forces the girl to be completely dependent on her physically, financially, and emotionally. She tells Rapunzel that good did not and could not ever exist outside the confines of her tower by saying "Mother knows best". Telling a person that they will never be able to defend themselves implies that that person is weak, helpless, and worthless without the narcissist's manipulation while calling it "love". Rapunzel was appropriately naive, and Mother Gothel used her for her own personal gain by essentially telling Rapunzel that she will never be loved by anyone else but her. The second reason I believe Mother Gothel is a narcissist is because she denies Rapunzel's reality, gaslighting her into trusting no one but this woman who had pretended to be her mother for eighteen years. Rapunzel escapes the prison of her tower for the first time in her life and meets Flynn Rider, a young man who demonstrates delinquency, but overall proves to be a good person. Narcissists cannot accept when they've lost control of their victims, so they try to isolate them. Mother Gothel had consistently and successfully done this for years, and when this inevitably fails, in her mind, the only way to fix this is to take control again by any means necessary. Every single good experience Rapunzel has with Flynn is minimized in a cruel attempt take every last drop of trust Rapunzel had away from her. I would like to reiterate that I do not think Mother Gothel is a good person, but one that we can learn from. There are countless adults who may have felt at some point in their life that they had no power; so, they take it out on their innocent children who don't know any better. It is imperative that we understand that people we trust can and will hurt us; Mother Gothel is a perfect example of who we should learn not to be.

When I was little, I always wondered why I felt so different from other kids my age. They seemed to enjoy life more than I did. And I couldn´t figure out why I was so sad, why I was slowly losing interest in what was once fun, why I didn´t want to smile as much as I used to. What exactly happens when a person doesn´t care anymore? I wanted to believe this sadness was something I´d get over, that one day I´d feel normal. People like to say ¨fake it ´til you make it¨ but I find that accepting the bad days, any negative state of mind, is a part of life. Some people´s mental illness is more permanent, and faking happiness your entire life doesn´t work for everyone. Eighteen years down the road and I finally understand that I can´t play the character of someone who can ignore who I am, and that´s when the coping mechanisms come in. It was around this time last year that I was at my lowest. The world becomes dangerous when you lose all hope in it. The bad times were worse than they´d ever been before, and they only thing that kept me around was knowing that people would miss me if I were suddenly gone one day. I also remembered that life is a constant state of ups and downs. Not every down means rock bottom; it means you´re in a rough patch, and it means character development. Life is about learning and growing, and that can be very painful before it gets better. I think that´s what truly kept me going; knowing that my teenage years make up a small percentage of my life and that once you´ve been at your lowest you can only go up from there. I also look up to people who grew up through hardships and lived to tell their story of how they struggled. My great grandma is 92 years old and talking to her reminds me that there is so much more to life than my problems; there truly is beauty in the dark.

To understand people, you have to get to know them on more than just a surface level. This may be from my personal experiences, but I find that a lot of people, in fact most of them, have very serious deep rooted issues; it´s just a matter of how they handle them. Imagine there are two people who have the same familial problems. Let´s say they both had pressure from their parents to do well in school. which puts high levels of stress on them at all times. They might have to walk on egg shells around certain family members. They BOTH live in survival mode at all times. These hypothetical people still remain different based on how they cope. The first person becomes a workaholic. They grow into an adult working as hard as they possibly can in order to subconsciously please who they tried to please as a child. They might even force it on their children later, passing the expectation down a generation because it is the only thing they´ve ever known. The second person gives up on working hard, falling into a pit of despair, accompanied by addiction, which will affect their family later in life if they live long enough to have one. Their children may even fall into addiction as well, and the cycle continues. I see these types of people everywhere I go. I had a friend who was smart, funny, responsible, overall and amazing person. But his parents were abusive; they pushed him to be perfect at school, at work, at home, and it was never enough. After they told him they would never let him go to college, he became the second person in the scenario. He fell apart in front of my eyes. He´s a shell of his former self and it breaks my heart knowing he may not be around in a couple of years if he keeps doing what he´s doing now. The reason I´m sharing this and focusing on person two in my scenario is because it is only getting worse. Kids these days are losing their sense of identity through generational trauma. Youth with potential but no support become the kinds of adults we see in the drug documentaries on Netflix who we pity but don´t think about when we´re not seeing it firsthand. The former friend I mentioned above is becoming more common, and I´m noticing a pattern of abuse in people like him. In my personal opinion, addiction is not a drug problem. It is not a peer pressure issue. It is not about education. It is about mental health. The only reason people don´t take addiction seriously is because it is so much more than just drugs. I´ve also seen what happens to people who had a bad home life but also had support. I have another friend who struggles with addiction but has friends to help her through what she is going through. Life is not perfect of course, but she´s alive and hasn´t given up. My goal is to be that support. All children want is to just be loved, and there is no textbook on how to be a good parent. Social work is a replacement for that textbook. People need to learn how to love sometimes, and it starts by having a conversation. The conversation of mental health is what humanizes what we´ve come to dehumanize.

When I was eight years old, a girl from my church moved into my house to be away from her family for a while (we'll call her Amber). I don't know the exact conditions of her home life, only that it was abusive. I always thought Amber was a very strange girl. She went to an alternative school for kids who were "different" as my mom put it. I didn't understand why tally marks seemed to have been sketched into her arms, or why she seemed so reckless, or why one day she ran away from us. All I knew was that Amber was special. Despite her impulsivity, she was funny, nice, and deeply cared about people. She was lovely and self-destructive and she hid the darkest parts of herself from everyone until one day she took her own life. I had never heard of the words "suicide" or "bipolar" until I attended her funeral service, full of people who hardly knew her at all. In hindsight, I don't think anyone could have truly seen Amber for who she was outside of her decisions. Mental health is personalized, and now, ten years later, I think I've finally begun to understand her. On April 25, 2021, I was admitted to a mental health facility. There I was met and welcomed with open arms by strangers who knew what it was like to be different and feel alone like me. It was here where I saw people in a new way; sad people are not weak, but in reality the strongest ones to walk this earth. We all had a collective understanding of each other's struggles, something I wish Amber could have had. I wish I could go back and tell her I'm bipolar too. I wish I could go back in time and tell her it would all be alright, and to just hold on a little bit longer. After I was released from the hospital I met someone from my school who had recently left a hospital too. He had been struggling with relationships, drug addiction, and very intense depressive episodes for a long time before I met him (we'll call him David). At this point in my life, I had grown to hate men as a whole, but listening to him opened my eyes. An entire group of people I had been accustomed to demonizing weren't evil anymore. I changed my mind because David reminded me of Amber, since they both had patterns of self harm and impulsivity. They're both good people with unseen problems and pasts sometimes too dark to put into words. I wish Amber could have met him. They would've been great friends. I want to be a psychologist because I know what it's like to feel alone. I watched so many of my friends work themselves up from rock bottom to become happier than they've been in years, and I could never express how proud I am to see them grow up. David taught me to be more openminded and listen to people I'd initially dislike. My friends from the mental hospital taught me I was not alone. Amber taught me what could happen to a good person who couldn't get help. Hopelessness is deadly, and that feeling can become more powerful than anything else in the moment. Treating children and teenagers before it's too late to save them needs to be taken more seriously. People who struggle with mental illness deserve to feel loved just as anyone else, and I want to be there for people who've felt alone like Amber did.

I believe the biggest and most threatening problem we face today is the ongoing encouragement of toxic masculinity. It´s become a plague that sets roles that should have never been given in the first place. It supports bad behavior and suppresses normal human reaction to stress, heartbreak, and whatever is on their mind that requires expressing of emotion for the men of our society. Many learn to become somewhat robotic and unfeeling, pushing away their identity and forced to embrace a life of silence. This is astronomically harmful, as it conditions our youth to submit to denial instead of understanding and acceptance. I find that the biggest differences between men and women is the expectations of responsibility and emotion. Women are deemed as ¨too emotional¨ but must be doing everything in her power to prove herself worthy of a man´s validation and respect. On the flip side, men are expected to be cold and closed off emotionally and to ¨man up¨, yet bad behavior is written off, and the phrase ¨boys will be boys¨ runs rampant. He can be immature in action and she cannot. She can cry in public and he cannot. The woman is dismissed by the man and the man cannot communicate with the woman, and so the cycle continues. It is strange to me how much this school of thought is so neglected in what should be productive conversations. Division among sexes is more than harmful. It is the reason relationships fail, marriages end, and systems are broken. The only way to end such an old cycle is to begin teaching our children the art of listening. Understanding another group´s struggles and traumas has been lost, and bringing it back is necessary to permanently change who we are as a collective, uniting what was once divided.

My favorite book is called ¨The Giver¨ written by Lois Lowry. I love it because it gives us an example of what our society would look like if people were treated equally. Everyone is happy. Everything is peaceful. Every man, woman, and child has their own place and role given to them and everyone is paid equally. On paper, this world Lowry creates for us is perfect. Yet there is no love, affection, or deep connections to be found; in reality, people feel nothing but blissful ignorance. They literally and figuratively do not see color, and the story proves to us that the combination of beauty and pain in ones life is what breaks the difference between surviving and living. The society is governed by a group of wise elders who feel the same lack of human emotions just like every other citizen. The only exception is one person in the council who´s title is The Giver. Givers live in a hut with memories collected from every single human being who has ever lived. The Giver takes on these memories and uses the information as knowledge when helping the council make big decisions in the community. It is a depressing and lonely role to live out, as the Giver is the only one who feels deep emotions, their knowledge dragging them down and the prevention of being able to share what they feel isolates them from their peers. This role is passed down from generation to generation in order to preserve the wisdom that comes from past experiences of others. This book is truly a masterpiece. It is beautiful and heart-wrenching and eye-opening; it tells the story of a place where the idea of human equality has been established without the humanity.