Recovery means working on it. I was told that by my mom, a recovering alcoholic. My mom hasn't drunk in five years, which is a goal I once thought she'd never meet, and I'm proud of her. She's always telling me how she's still working on it, despite not having a drink in almost half a decade. She's always telling me how she'll never NOT be an alcoholic. It was hard to hear at first - I didn't understand what she was saying, and I assumed she was telling me she'd continue to drink. She didn't mean that. Recovery takes time. I know this because I'm in recovery because of addiction. I'm eighteen, and I'm struggling to keep up with those around me because when I was fifteen I popped a pill at a party I was too young to go to. Recovery means sitting on my bed and crying some days because I hadn't been high in a year. Most days, though, I go to class, I go walking with friends, and I swim without a problem. Recovery is unique. My mom sees herself as an alcoholic, despite being sober for five years, and I see myself as a recovered addict, despite being clean for a year. Recovery is, as I like to say, the hardest and best thing that will ever happen to an addict. Recovery means working on it.

My "dream version" of my future self is a fingerprint analyst, helping people.

When I was twelve, my mother was arrested for raping a young boy I knew. We were neighbors, and while he was older than me, I still cared for him and enjoyed being around him. It happened fast. It sounds crazy, but it's the truth - I don't remember all of it. He stayed in my brother's room that night, snug in the air mattress we'd blown up for him, and my mom stayed in her room, across the trailer. I woke up to my brother telling me "Mom's getting arrested", and I rolled from my bed to the living room to see my mother, the woman I had loved and devoted everything I had to, being cuffed by a tall, large police officer. I don't remember everything else, but when asked, my brother told me she had screamed and dug her heels into the dirt until they dragged her to the car. After that, the part I do remember, the forensic team came in. We, my brother, my mother's boyfriend, and I, sat on the couch and watched as men and women in gloves went over every surface of our home with a fine-toothed comb. One woman, who was wearing a black coat and glasses almost the same as mine, took our fingerprints, so we wouldn't be ruled as "suspects", or something along those lines. Her name was Lana. She was pretty and tall, and she told me she was a forensic scientist. I was one with that term like white on rice. As we packed our things into my brother's car to move into my grandmother's house, I googled. Forensic science, law enforcement, criminology, they were all words that I'd heard before but now they had meaning. Now I wasn't an oblivious bystander, now I was an expert. I loved telling myself that. Fingerprint analysis. It's the one that I caught and got stuck on. It was the one, you know the one that circles in your brain until you start to sweat and get all anxious about. It was the one. I was twelve, and tonight I am seventeen (almost eighteen, though no one likes to think that they're almost an adult because that's when things start to become real), and I'm still stuck like glue. I knew from a young age I wanted to help people. I knew it, though then it was a nurse or teacher or firefighter. Now, and for almost six years, it's been fingerprint analysis. It's been helping people through science and criminal law. It's been saving lives through law enforcement and stopping violence. I want to move up in the world, to help as many people as I can. My therapist told me it was because of how my mother wronged so many people, how she hurt them and now I'm on my way to show the world that the apple wasn't dropped by the tree, but in reality, flung away and landed in an orange grove. I think it's always been there, under my skin and biting at my heels. I want to move up, I want to be a scientist to help people, to save people. It's been a dream, and now, in a month and a half, it's about to be my reality, it's going to be my rock-solid future. I, for one, cannot wait.

When I was nine, I wrecked my bike. It was bad - two nights in the hospital, road rash on my knee, face and elbow, and seven stitches holding my knee together. In the following weeks, I would fall victim to my brother and a pair of tweezers, and my mother and an ointment that smelled like a dead bear (I exaggerate only a smidge). My brother would peel at my road rash with his tweezers, announcing like the loud men on ESPN the length of skin he peeled from my face and arms. My mom would rub the ointment (anti scar and blemish) onto my face and mummer prayers to Jesus as she did so. I was heavily concussed, and most of the first week is a blur, except the prayers and my brother, who was thirteen, paling my hair with his sweaty hands. The prayers were quiet, meant for Jesus and Jesus only, but I could imagine what my mother was saying. "Dear Jesus, thank you for saving my baby, thank you for not giving her brain damage after her skull bounced off the pavement. Amen." Jesus got a lot of those prayers, and he got some from me, too, though mine were mainly moans of pain and hatred as Ethan, my brother, peeled skin from my face, because "Missy, that's what Doctor Peggy said to do!". Doctor Peggy, my savior, was the doctor at the walk in clinic that we frequently went to after the accident, because the hospital was too far away and too crowded for my mom. She was older, and the first woman doctor I'd ever met in person, thanks to my West Virginia knowledge and lack of diverse hires in the Kingwood Medical Center. She was my hero. Dr. Peggy liked science and, while I caught up on homework and she made sure my brain wasn't bruised or bleeding or cooking up an aneurysm, she would quiz me. She liked the same cop TV shows my mom and I watched together, and she liked the same thing I did in the forensic TV shows - fingerprint analysis. When I moved cities, I switched Doctors, of course, but i never forgot the talks she gave me, the ones about women being more than just housewives, and inspiring me to become a docto. One day, it switched from doctor to my true passion, fi ger prints, and it never switched back. I always counted on Dr. Peggy to bring me up, to twll me that being a girl couldnt stop me from doing what I wanted. Two weeks into my junior year, my mom called and told me Dr. Peggy died. I couldn't tell you much about her, other than what I've already said. I couldn't tell you her last name, nor could I tell you the last thing she ever said to me. The only thing I could tell you is that she saved my life. Dr. Peggy was a woman. She was a strong woman who held my hand when she gave me my shots and talked to my about science and math and boys and eventually sex and condoms and teen pregnancy. She saved my life, even if she wasn't in the hospital that stopped my bleeding and stitched me back together again. She taught me that being a woman was a blessing, and that I was stronger than I thought I was. She saved my life and taught me to be myself, taught me my full potential before I even knew what she was talking about. I'm forever in her debt.

Question one: I grew up thinking, hoping, I'd help people. First it was a firefighter, then it was an FBI agent, then it was a patrol officer. All I've ever wanted to do was help people. Fingerprint analysis, which I hope to go into one day, is not the crime fighting, exciting job I had hoped for when I was watching cop TV shows and playing with my brothers. It's not all that exciting, not for those who don't like computers or science or, as my mom once said, going blind trying to find the littlest details in the biggest room. I wanted to help people, and now I have the chance to help catch criminals. This is what I want to do - this is what I (at 17 and a baby) have devoted my adult life to. Helping people. It's my dream, to help those around me, to inspire young girls to do as much as they can do, to help the trailer trash raise above the foul words and cruel looks. I'm not trailer trash anymore, I'm a young woman who's ready to help everyone I possibly can. I want to be able to help those kids who lost their mom's, their brothers, their daddy's, the mothers who question if their son is still alive, the sisters who pray for an answer, the victim who is tired. My impact on the lives of those around me, the community I plan to help, it's going to change my life, but more importantly, it might just change theirs. Question two: When I was eleven years old, my mom stabbed her boyfriend of three years. My brother and I were thrust into a new home with a second cousin, and my mom was locked in a jail cell about three hours away. She got out on a bond, and I swore I'd protect her, somehow prove a guilty woman innocent. When I was twelve, she raped my best friend. When I was thirteen, my brother killed himself, and when I was seventeen, nine kids in my high school OD'd on opioids. I guess the answer to this question isn't "who" inspired me, because if that were the answer, I'd sound like a narcissistic. I could say "it was me, I saw awful things, I let awful things happen, I didn't want another little girl like me to suffer, I wanted to make the world better because I knew I could". But I won't, because deep down I know the true answer isn't something so simple. Who inspired me to pursue a career in law enforcement? The world. The world that keeps changing, and not completely for the better, the world that let's little girls like me and hundreds of little girls who had it so much worse fall into the role of "victim" and not "hero". The world inspired me to become someone who helps. It doesn't hurt that I've always wanted to help people, though.