Mississippi School of the Arts
High School
2022 – 2024

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Even if you made one misstep, it felt like you were miles apart from the group you were a part of. It made me feel like everything in my life had to be perfect, and if I wanted to succeed in life, I had to do it with no mistakes. I built myself up so much that I thought since I had good grades and had a home and a family, I was living a perfect life, and that fact alone just made me inherently better than everyone else. Then I slipped and fell during our performance. I felt that everyone was going to be upset with me, mad, or at least express some sort of emotion, but no one did. I thought my one slip ruined the whole show, and I ruined everyone's hard work. The next day I came to school, and no one even cared to remember or just didn’t care enough to. I realized that, despite all of your attempts to avoid or correct errors, mistakes occur on a daily basis. As humans, we make mistakes. We don’t learn and grow to become perfect; we do it to improve ourselves. This also made me change my opinion on art. And I started to ask myself what made my art prefect—was it even prefect at all? When I looked at my art, I was so rigid and concerted that I thought that every line had to be perfect when I first started painting. As I've developed as an artist, I've come to believe that flawed paintings with flawed materials and meaningless compositions are far more interesting than faultless paintings that are just too perfect to be worth caring about. Life is full of dumb mistakes and heat-of-the-moment decisions; all we can do is learn about them and grow.
High School
2022 – 2024