I don’t think anyone would disagree with me when I say: at the time of graduation, High School is the most emotional and confusing time in your life so far. As a senior two months away from graduation looking back at these past 17 years, I can confidently say that nothing else has made me laugh louder, cry harder, or question the meaning of life more than these past four years. For me, High School has been a never ending tumult of ridiculously explosive emotions and some of the best memories I will ever make. I know that twenty years from now I will look back and remember all the wonderful times I had, but there will also be no forgetting all of the horrible ones, and even more than that, the music that got me through those darker days. If I’m being totally honest, junior and senior year have been some of the worst of my life. I have gone through more emotional and mental pain than I ever could have imagined at the beginning of freshman year. These last two years have been nothing if not incredibly difficult and arduous. Over the years I’ve lost friends, forgotten who I am, been through breakups, reinvented myself, had several panic attacks, failed a couple tests, procrastinated several weeks of my life away, cried myself to sleep, and overall, fallen apart many times. There is one thing that has been there with me through it all: music. Whether its Journey pulling me out of a break up, Boy Genius lulling me to sleep, The Smiths giving me the energy to keep going, Lizzy McAlpine making me realize what I’m actually feeling, or Laufey calming the worst of my anxiety, music has pulled me through the hardest times and supported me in the best ones. On average I listen to three hours of music a day. From the moment I wake up until the very last second before the school bell rings, I am blasting The Beach Boys or ACDC to get me pumped for the day. In class, I sneak headphones so I can stream 21 Pilots or Red Hot Chili Peppers to keep me sane. While I do my homework I pump TV Girl, The Marias or Tally Hall through my headphones to help me stay focussed, and at night I drift off to Billie Eilish or Deftones. Some would say that music is just my form of escapism, and I suppose that sometimes that’s true, but more often I feel that music makes me live and feel everything even more than I would have on my own. For me, music isn’t a way to distract myself from my feelings, it’s quite the opposite. It helps me to understand myself, my feelings, their cause, and sometimes feel more deeply. Gerard Way has helped me express my deepest fears and Lizzy Mc Alpine has helped me to untangle even the most confusing wants of my heart. Me listening to music is not me running away from my feelings, but fully embracing them. It helps me to laugh when I want to, and cry when I need to. Music is the thing that has kept me alive the last 2-4 years, and shaped me into who I am today. Music has been with me the last 17 years, and it will continue to be for the rest of my life; because without music, there is no me.

I think it’s a pretty standard idea that writing is done with a pen, pencil, or computer, but when I first started, I used Legos. The first story I ever remember writing was my brother and I with our Legos. Together, we would wake up early before school every day and continue playing out our epic tale: Questrella. We spent years playing through the same stories, revising and editing them as we twisted them down hundreds of different paths. Questrella was the first story I ever created and also the first I ever actually wrote down. Even though I haven’t worked on it in years, I think about it every time I sit down to write a new story. It’s a constant reminder of what writing means to me. Questrella isn’t just some game or story; it’s everything that made up my childhood. It’s innocence and imagination and everything I miss about being a kid. It’s the chance to be completely creative and have the power to do whatever I want because it’s my own story. To me, writing is, and has always been, about having the freedom to go anywhere I can imagine. I’ve been to distant deserts, far away forests, and created entire universes from within the four walls of my room. Ever since those days in my childhood bedroom, I’ve known that I want to be a writer. When I sit down to write, I’m immediately transported back to the innocence and beauty of childhood imagination. I’m taken back to those happy-go-lucky days of being a kid and not having a care in the world. Especially at this point in my life, when all I’m supposed to be thinking about is college and my future, writing is something that will always make me feel young again. And even though life feels scary now, I know that it will only continue to get worse, which is why I am so grateful to have writing in my life. It is something that I will be focussing on in college, not just for my ultimate goal to be an author but as a way to always return to my younger self. In my future college years, I am so excited to study writing as an English major and continue my journey as an author. There is truly nothing that I love more than knitting together character arcs, plot twists, and symbolism into one intertwined masterpiece. I am overjoyed to spend the next four years of my life practicing and perfecting the thing I love most. Writing has been a part of me for as far back as I can remember, and I know that it always will be.