For four years, I was a part of a cult. When I was 14 I joined a church that seemed to be filled with vibrant, philanthropic individuals. Having been a quiet, lonely person, I was all in. I was enveloped and fascinated with this new life. We had unspoken rules, and like many other cults, leaving was not an easy option. We worked tirelessly giving our time and our money. We cut off friends and family. Marriages were arranged and dating was forbidden. When anyone tried to leave, we would love bomb them or shun them. In 2016 we found out that the pastor had sexually violated two women, and was preying on many more. He had 2 kids and a wife. Beyond this, he preyed on people with broken souls. It's not what people think--we were not a group of outcasts. We were young, fun, and attractive, but we were slaves to the pastor and the culture he created. Leaving this cult in my first year of college, I was lost. I did not know how to make friends without an evangelical motive. I had not dated or gone to parties. Being in this new free world somehow felt suffocating. But I learned. I committed to therapy, unpacking trauma and dysfunction starting from childhood. I repaired relationships and made new, healthy ones. I withdrew and failed out of school many times. I partied (hard). I worked. I set boundaries. Now, I am finishing my degree in social work at the top of my class and applying for my masters. I served as the editor-in-chief of a university newspaper. I am a research fellow. I am these things because of my experiences. I am the person that was tucked away for so long. I didn't turnaround, I rose up.

If you ask my friends and family to describe me in one word, it's "busy." I wake up and hit the ground running not out of anxious urgency or people pleasing motives, but because I feel fulfilled in myself, my career, my relationships, and my decisions. I feel so sure of the steps I've taken. My bucket list is full with goals that touch all parts of my life--financial, mental and physical health, relationships, professional and educational, and travel. I've accomplished some of those bucket list items. I wanted to travel with friends, so I did. I wanted to do open water swim races, so I did. I wanted to be the editor-in-chief of my university's newspaper, so I did (with the help and support of many). I wanted to heal from my past, so I did therapy for six years. These bucket list items kept me busy, but it also kept me happy, sane, and connected. Over time, my bucket list items have become increasingly vague. Before, it was filled with goals like "Become an attorney" or "Achieve CEO status." Now it's "Find a fulfilling job with a healthy work culture" or "Find ways to move your body that make you feel happy." As I apply to graduate schools for my master in social work degree, I have taken the same approach. The part of me that loves planning has softened because I realized the tighter boundaries I put around my bucket list items, the less grace I give myself to explore, change, and evolve. There's one bucket list item that will never really be done with which is "Do things that make you happy." I am applying for my master's degree because it makes me happy, and I hope to continue to fill my bucket with happy things.

It was when I learned writing is a form of art that I am an artist. I am lucky to have landed upon writing; it was the saving grace in many different phases of my life. I owe this discovery to my high school teacher, Leslie Inouye. His class was called "Making a Personal Statement," and he exposed me to the different types of writing--journalistic, poetic, analytical, etc. He did exactly what his course intended. I found my voice in written words and discovered feelings, thoughts, and memories that I never encountered before. I took writing with me everywhere after Mr. Inouye's class, using it as a compass. As I increasingly took on leadership positions, I faced failure and criticism, as well as question of my character. In those moments, I would re-read my personal writings. It would ground me, remind me how I arrived at that point, and would gently push me to look at this moment as a larger part of a story. What does this character learn from this? I healed through written words, and I would like to think I helped others heal as well. I joined my school's newspaper and my first editorial piece was called "Step off the scale" challenging diet culture. I investigated haphazard dorm conditions pushing the university administration to tend to their students' concerns. I wrote some of the most morbid and hurtful words in the privacy of my journal, as well as some of my brightest moments. When my family member was dying of cancer, I wrote down everything I remembered about her, and when she died, I re-read those pieces and cried with both sorrow and gratitude. Art is a language which has existed long before any dialect. Let's keep speaking the language of art.

I did not enter social work with an interest in public health, but it became increasingly worrisome to me that autoimmune and medical diagnoses were not only misunderstood, but came with a punitive and shameful tone. I am evidence that a shame-based and stigmatized approach to medical treatment counteracts the mission of healthcare. I was always blamed for my weight growing up. I put on weight rapidly as a child, and even more so as an adolescent. I vividly remember my parents and I being told by a physician that I had a food addiction and no self-control. My doctor made me carry a twenty pound rice bag to demonstrate the "extra weight" I was carrying. No lab tests run, no questions about my diet or exercise, just sheer judgement. This was met with my parents making separate, low-caloric meals for me at meal times. Seven years old and on, I was put in endless sports and woken up to exercise before school. Nevertheless, the weight stayed as well as the shame. I later developed disordered eating and severe body dysmorphia. I was angry at my body for betraying me and angry at myself for my lack of self control. Then finally, at 18 years old, I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. Along with that came insulin resistance that was slowly becoming Type 2 diabetes (resulting from lack of early treatment and "yo-yo" dieting). It all made sense; the weight gain, cystic acne, irregular menstruation (if at all), and the hirsutism. It was when an eating disorder specialized dietitian and physicians looked further into my biology and found explanations for my unexplained weight gain. I was so angry; so angry at my parents and family, bullies who teased me incessantly, and most of all the myriad of doctors who labeled me as lazy and food addicted. They boiled me down to a number on the scale and their treatment was shame. Enter social work. I studied social work with a general intent on helping people, but I slowly began to understand shame and its detrimental role in any medical, mental, or behavioral treatment. Shame is the root cause of suffering, yet we motivate ourselves with it. So I began to flip the narrative in my head by speaking up and speaking loudly. It went a little like: -"Fat is not synonymous with lazy." -"Diet culture is a form of misogyny." - "Raise girls to be proud of what their bodies can do, not what their bodies look like." I remember talking to a friend who had Type 1 diabetes who did not know at the time that I was teetering on the edge of having Type 2. She said, "People made fun of me growing up because of my insulin, but itʻs not like Iʻm one of those fat shits who eat themselves to type 2." It stung. It hurt. But the bottom line was that both diabetes type 1 and type 2 come with painful associations and judgements. Our generation has come a long way with educating ourselves on body inclusivity and acceptance. I want to take this a step further. How about we just let bodies be by changing the language around medical diagnoses and weight and other numerical vitals? As I purse my masterʻs of social work with a focus on social policy, I want to advocate for change in the treatment of children and adolescents. With my lived experiences, I will push for change in AMA policies and the inclusion of education on effective language and interventions regarding chronic illness of any kind in healthcare.

Studies show that humor is a large factor in resilience. I can attest to that. I never faced food or housing insecurity, but I did face familial trauma. Affluence was the rug that covered the emotional turmoil of my household; abusive parents, substance use, a grandpa with paranoia and many bouts of schizophrenia. The list goes on. My solution? Finding reasons to laugh. In the good moments we had as a family, I would reenact funny movie scenes, memorize witty quips from TV shows, mimic comedians I saw on TV, and observe my surroundings looking for a moment in which humor could be injected. For the most part, it worked. This became, and is, a large factor of my professional and educational success. Finding the funny in all situations lets you view the world around you as it is--fleeting moments. (A cheesy line, I know. I just cringed and Iʻm the one who wrote it.) My first job was at Subway when I was 16 years old. Petrified but equally excited, I entered bravely into the sandwich making world only to find that I was pretty bad at it. It came to a point where I was only allowed to work at the cashier until I could master the art of sandwich making. Working as a server and being yelled at by customers or getting into tiffs with coworkers about who gets the last bread loaf in the middle of a mad rush were short bursts of stress later relieved by a good laugh at the intensity of our fight over stale sourdough and zesty herb olive oil. The secret to humorʻs charm is that it lets us make sense of the world around us. Humor asks us to recognize that we are human.

Growing up, I watched my dad be inordinately generous. I recall him on many occasions seeing a group of people in military uniforms dining a few tables away from us and quietly handing the server his card to purchase their meal. Despite being a busy doctor, he spent weekends providing medical treatment to the unhoused in downtown Honolulu on his weekends. These examples are a tiny sliver of his generosity and limited to only what I witnessed; he has generosity engrained in his DNA and gave quietly without wanting attention. In turn, my dad engrained in me a spirit of generosity and an instinctual urge to give even when there does not seem to be a defined reason to do so, even when someone does not "deserve" my giving. His generosity is grounded in a sense of gratitude; gratitude for my ancestors who immigrated to America and started as plantation workers working their way to academia and financial stability and gratitude that our familyʻs worries were trivial and never about food, housing, or clothing. More so, he recognized that the person who lacks basic necessities very well could have been one of us. This led me to social work. Social work asks us to give not only our time, but our emotions. It asks us to empathize. It asks us to do these things without expecting anything in return (except a below average salary). But when I put social work into the context of gratitude, it stops being about what people are asking of us or what we are giving. Instead, It becomes a sense of responsibility. It has everything to do with empathy and that voice in your head that looks at someone in a hard situation and says "That could very well have been me."