Growing up, children were never my favorite. I didn’t like how loud they were, I didn’t like how messy they could be, and I didn’t like how honest they were. However, when I started my senior year of high school, I warmed up more and more to the idea of children. I knew I wanted some, I imagined a picket fence with two or three kids running around with a whole bunch of animals we adopted and cared for. This feeling was much deeper, though. The case of Gabriel Fernandez shook the world and I had watched the Netflix documentary of his case, his unnecessary and totally preventable death pointed out flaws in the system. He was only eight years old and had a loving home with his uncles until he was ripped away, given to his murderers on a silver plater. His mother did not protect him and the system failed to do the same as his stepfather took his life away. Although I was a journalism major at the time, the idea of changing the Child Welfare System was always clinging to the back of my mind. It wasn’t until my sophomore year, almost a year ago today, that I had decided that no longer was I passionate about journalism.. No, I had another passion that had been there my entire life that had just been sparked. I became a Child Advocacy Major. More specifically, I knew that I wanted to either become an occupational therapist for children or work as a social worker and counselor at a hospital. As a person who has OCD and anxiety, I want to be a voice and a comfort for children. I especially want to catch the Gabriel Fernandez's, Anthony Alavos’s, and Noah Cuartos’s of the world, saving them from preventable deaths that the above were not able to avoid. Catching the failures within the system is not my only passion when it comes to wellbeing of children and teens, I want to also focus my attention on juvenile delinquents. “Problem” children that really are acting out of pain and unable to voice themselves. The school-to-prison pipeline is not a joke, it is a major problem that has only grown over the years and it starts with the kids in the juvenile detention system. Children of color and children of disabilities are the main targets of this pipeline, taking their voices away and pushing them towards a life of crime solely based on their skin color and/or disability. Overall, my passion for these social issues does not come from my past or childhood. This passion comes from my love of other human beings and my love for making this world a more peaceful place. A peaceful place starts with happy and supported children.

For a start, I believe my life is very privileged despite my challenges. I have a great mother who has raised me on her own since I was 7 and I went to decent public schools that wanted to see me succeed. I was the secretary of my Big Brother Big Sister program at my high school and I can say I was gifted with the ability to help children and their families. However, despite all of these great things, I was diagnosed with OCD and severe anxiety at the age of twenty-one in my second year of college. The entirety of my life was finally explainable, I was no longer silently suffering whilst accomplishing and loving all the things I mentioned above. Despite answers finally being revealed, my road to acceptance and recovery was hard - and is still hard. My symptoms kept me from doing so many things such as making more friends, presenting in class, leaving my dorm room: all things that are important to a social life to a brand new college student. It took me months to overcome, endless nights of crying, panic attacks, and questioning my will to be on this planet anymore. To my mental health’s credit, it did do one thing right. It opened my eyes to what I really wanted to do in life - help children through diagnoses like my own and assist them on seeing the world how I see it now.. full of hope and gratitude. Helping children is how I want to give back to my community. I hope to give children and their families a peace of mind when they see me. During my time with my undiagnosed brain, I desperately needed someone to help me see the light on the other side of the tunnel and in my culture, there was no such thing as “mental health.” Hispanic children are taught that “mental health” is only a phase, ironically “all in our head,” and that they just need to keep their minds busy. While yes, a lot of what I mentioned is technically true scientifically, I will not help a child recover from what their brain conjures up. I want to be the light at the end of the tunnel, an ear for them to feel listened, and a voice to advocate for them when they cannot. I hope to help children in my community, within the welfare system, and in the juvenile justice system. Philately can be incredibly helpful to children who want to have a niche, inexpensive hobby. Postage stamps are being lost to history as more and more technology floods in and they are severely important to how our postal system operates and has operated for centuries. Similarly to collecting scout badges, pokemon cards, and other collectibles, I would create a collectible book with different postage stamps pockets and their descriptions so children can fill up these small pockets with the stamps mentioned in the book. This book would be excellent for traveling in country and abroad, creating memories for children and their families to look back on. There will be fun activities like going to buy a stamp for Santa’s Letter during Christmas, being penpals with other children who own this book, and coloring pages of different stamps that can be colored in! There could also be a journal section where they write about their adventures of how they retrieved the stamp, very much for journaling people like myself! Books like these can help children and teens with similar diagnoses as mine, calming the mine and looking forward to the world.