Ever since I moved to my current school district in the sixth grade, I have won the district Christmas card contest every other year, having my art sent on a greeting card to all local households and businesses. I have also designed nearly every one of my school district’s T-shirts via design contests. And because of my nearly monthly attendance at school board meetings for recognitions for my art awards, my school, and even my whole town, has come to know me as “the girl who wins all the art contests.” However, many are surprised to know that I do not want to become an artist. On the contrary, I wish to become a family physician to solve a global healthcare issue which was the reason for my venture into the arts. As a small child, I suffered from asthma. At around two years old, my mom noticed that I was always breathing heavily, with a heartbeat that seemed to physically move her hand when she placed it over my chest. We sought medical help–but the diagnosis process placed my family in a tough situation. At the time, my dad was in the United States fighting against racial discrimination and labor trafficking after he became a victim of it himself in the Signal International labor trafficking case. Meanwhile, my mom, my brother, and I lived in India with my dad’s parents. My asthma diagnosis was expected to be quick; my symptoms were severe, and we expected the doctors to understand the matter in no time. Little were we expecting the process to take three years, all the while adding to the financial burden of my already struggling family with each doctor’s visit that seemed to take us nowhere. It was during these difficult times that my mom discovered my love for art. Because of my asthma, we often stayed at my cousin’s house for weeks at a time in order to not burden my grandparents with my care. My aunt was an art teacher–she had a room reserved as her studio. She often let me play around with her paints and pastels and pencils, and when I returned to my grandparents’ house, my grandparents discovered a new nuisance–my increasing tendency to draw on the walls. But my mom noticed that this new interest made me happy–she noticed that art was my distraction from my suffering while I waited for a diagnosis and treatment plan for my asthma. And so, although it angered my grandparents, she talked them into letting me project my wild imagination onto the walls, promising them that they will get their walls repainted when I grow up just a little. By around third grade, my asthma had nearly completely faded away. For the longest time, I did, in fact, want to become an artist–but my high school journey has moved me in another direction. I realized that having art as a career would transform it from a haven to a necessity–I feared that becoming an artist would take the joy out of something that helped me escape some of the most difficult times of my life. And so, I resolved to become a doctor. I noticed that the problem of obtaining a fast diagnosis was a problem in not only India, but the whole world–and to become the solution to the problem, I would place myself in the place where the process begins: in the office of the family physician.