My best back-to-school tip is this: use crazy colorful sticky notes to stay organized! Use them as bookmarks, write down homework assignments on a sticky note and put it in the front of your folder, and attach sticky notes that say "turn in" on your homework assignments so you don't lose them! The rationale for this brilliant-but-simple tip is this: staying organized can be really challenging, particularly since students have so many papers; so, using sticky notes to write down important details and placing them in strategic locations (i.e. on a homework assignment as a reminder to turn it in) helps students remember that important information. The colorful, noticeable nature of sticky notes also enables students to easily remember where that information is written down: if a student establishes the habit of always writing down due dates and homework reminders on sticky notes attached to their assignments, then, when looking for that information, they simply have to open their folder and spot the colorful sticky notes flagging their assignments.

A great book makes you feel the weight of words and the emotion they evoke. It develops a connection between your life and the lessons it attempts to teach. A great book has a distinct, captivating voice, and feels cohesive in a way that doesn’t depend on its attention to chronology: the author draws the reader into their own logic for uniting stories or facts. My favorite book is called “Just Above My Head” by James Baldwin, because it epitomizes these qualities of a great book. I fell in love with “Just Above My Head” when I read it during the national COVID-19 lockdown. It was a deeply lonely time: there were no other kids to talk to, and amid the silence and isolation, many things I’d been outrunning for a long time were finally catching up to me: burnout from activism, despair for crises occurring in the world, heartache from a past relationship, and a torment of confusion surrounding my identity. Yet the characters in the book could empathize with me: they, too, were struggling with intersecting crises, and the paradox between despair and hope had become their lexicon for talking about the world. I was captivated by Baldwin’s voice- his distinct use of rhythm and musical harmony of words- and by the sense of cohesion he developed through his specific arrangement of stories. In “Just Above My Head”, Baldwin elicited emotion from readers by causing us to feel the weight of words, and transformed this weight into lessons relevant to our lives. “Just Above My Head” epitomizes the qualities of a great book, and this is why it is my favorite.

The insidious stigma historically associated with mental health struggles still impedes many people today from being able to safely communicate about their struggles and receive the support they need. It projects shame onto people struggling with mental health by invalidating them in ways such as telling them to “get over it”, or assuming they are being overdramatic or attention-seeking. An excellent, practical solution toward helping people who struggle with mental health is to eradicate the stigma associated with mental illness, because this will allow people with these struggles to feel safe to talk about them, and encourage investment in mental health support. Stigma can be combated by education, which must occur on the interpersonal and institutional levels, and is influenced by policy. Local, state, and federal governments should allocate more financial resources to mental health education in schools, beginning with funding one mental health professional in every public school. The federal Department of Education should then set a requirement for each public school to develop a comprehensive curriculum on mental health which details the biological and social factors that influence mental health, the role of mental health professionals, and the importance of healthy coping skills. Adults should seek out opportunities to educate themselves and their friends, and advocate for comprehensive mental health education in their workplaces. Conversations about mental health in youth and adult spaces, normalized by widespread mental health education, make the need for investment in mental health support known. Addressing the mental health struggles faced by millions of people today and providing the necessary support will not be easy, nor can it be achieved using only one solution. However, focusing on destigmatizing mental health through community education is an excellent practical solution for people struggling with mental health.

When people consider solving the climate crisis, they often don’t think about entrepreneurship, nor about the power of youth. I propose that we not only consider, but prioritize both. It is important to note, I have no personal authority outside of my own experience- I don’t have a PhD in environmental engineering or climate science; I haven’t been alive long enough to have achieved the brand of prestige which affords instant credibility to those who possess it. However, I’m a high school student with my own brand of credibility in that I wake up every day and I dare to imagine. I choose to bring my passion for entrepreneurship and my innate creativity into full consciousness instead of allowing my ideas to die in obscurity, suffocated by the darkness we call fear of failure. Yet passion means nothing without the courage to bring our ideas forth, so I choose to take a step of courage and propose that Mechanism invest in my digital environmental advocacy school. As a teen entrepreneur, the writing I do pertaining to my entrepreneurship has multiple purposes: to describe, to inform, to challenge, and to persuade. I’m going to be doing all four of these now, and I think it important to disclose my strategy because there is no time to mince words when the issues my digital environmental advocacy school is designed to solve are so imminent. So: my vision of this digital school is that it will be a massive learning community of young people aged 13-25, who will download an app I’ve designed called Climactic. This app will allow them to access interactive videos, webinars, learning activities, a full year’s curriculum of education and training on becoming an environmental activist, a personal “workspace” for each user, and a messaging platform. Each user’s personal workspace will send them daily prompts to journal about the kind of world they want to live in and the environmental solutions they imagine creating to make their visions possible: a discipline in entrepreneurial thought. The personal workspace will also correspond to a group workspace on Canva Pro, a tool for creating presentational content that suits visionary entrepreneurial endeavors. The messaging feature will allow them to connect to other youth taking the year-long course at the same pace as them, as well as youth alumni and mainstream activists, in real time, who can provide feedback on their entrepreneurial ideas! Simply put, Climactic is an entrepreneurial endeavor with the goal of engaging in mass revolutionary coaching to equip young people to pursue entrepreneurship within environmental advocacy- and it’s powerful for a number of reasons. The climate crisis is real, and its impacts are worsening. The United Nations climate science body informed the public in a monumental 2018 climate report that we have only twelve years left- now eight- to make “massive and unprecedented changes” to global energy infrastructure to limit global warming. It stated that the entire industrialized world must cut its emissions in half by the year 2030 in order to have a 50% chance of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (a threshold of warming beyond which scientists cannot predict the ensuing, surely-fatal consequences). Additionally, there are so many intersectional crises which the climate crisis exacerbates, such as the plastics crisis, the public health effects of pollution and water contamination, environmental racism, food waste, and overpopulation, among others. I challenge you, what better voice to turn to than youth during this moment in time? Which better entrepreneurial imaginations to turn to than those of youth, who are unique in that we have not yet become entrenched in modern, socialized ways of thinking, in that so many of us have not lost the curiosity spurring us to find new ways of looking at the world? It is true that many people do not look to the ingenuity of entrepreneurship, nor the power of youth, when considering how we can solve the climate crisis- but in view of the seriousness of the climate crisis and the brilliant potential of youth-developed entrepreneurial solutions, we should.

What if, even when we don’t have control over our mental health struggles, we can choose how we respond to them, and grow as a result? Taking responsibility for my mental health has always been difficult for me, because I never recognized the validity of my struggles with mental health. I knew how privileged I was to have never experienced the shattering loss of a loved one; the physical, emotional and verbal abuse of a dysfunctional home environment; the trappings of poverty, or the chains of inequality. Nothing I had experienced was remotely as awful, so I believed I had no valid cause to feel badly about anything I had gone through. I also grew up thinking that vulnerability was a brand of weakness which should be avoided at all costs, so when I did begin experiencing serious mental health struggles, I refused to recognize them as such. My best friend grappled with depression and self-harm for years, culminating in a suicide attempt when we were in eighth grade. He is one of those rare, beautiful people who wears his heart on his sleeve. I will never forget the day he confessed to me for the first time that he’d been cutting himself. He showed me the cuts on his arms, and when I finally tore my eyes away, I looked up into his face and saw the heartbreak written there. I knew afterward that I wanted to learn everything I could to support him and others around us who were privately struggling with their mental health. I became involved with my school’s chapter of Be Nice, a national organization which focuses on mental health education in public schools. Technically, it was a group for high school students only, but I was permitted to participate because a teacher vouched for me. He saw my passion for mental health issues and wanted to provide me with an outlet to advocate. I was also an activist in many other areas- by the time I started ninth grade, I was involved in sustainability- organizing recycling for large event venues, president of my school’s Green Team and a student representative on my city’s Sustainability Committee- and involved in social justice: participating in panels on preventing gun violence, organizing an actionable vigil for the prevention of gun violence; speaking about LGBTQ+ issues, and becoming increasingly involved in Be Nice’s education campaigns. The more advocacy responsibilities I took on, the more concerned I became with achieving ever-higher standards. I became perfectionistic, and I wanted every moment to be productive, because somewhere along the way I began to believe that my worth as a person was defined by the changes I helped create. Simultaneously, other aspects of my life were falling apart. I was so isolated due to being engaged in activism all the time that I neglected my social life; I no longer had close friends or spent time with family. When COVID-19 hit, I was forced to slow down and forced to admit that I wasn’t okay. My mom, who is a doctor- smart, motivated, and the best person I know- insisted that I exercise every day, which began positively influencing my mental health. We researched mindfulness coping skills together, and she encouraged me to implement them. Yet I still had not challenged myself to target and debunk fundamental beliefs I held which were rendering me incapable of healthily coping with my mental health struggles. It was during a low point of depression that a massive turning point occurred for me. I was talking on the phone to my uncle, describing my desire to simply escape what I was going through, when he asked me, “what makes you think you should be able to opt out of learning from your struggles like everyone else has to?” That moment was an epiphany for me, because it caused me to realize that while we have no control over the mental health struggles we’re experiencing, we do have full responsibility for how we respond once we’ve recognized them. I understood that I was struggling with anxiety and depression, but until that moment, I hadn’t acknowledged that what I’m feeling during a given moment isn’t necessarily what is true. My identity and worth aren’t defined by what I’m feeling; in fact, my decision to shape myself, instead of allowing myself to be shaped by toxic old beliefs, is what defines me. I no longer have to allow my old beliefs about what constitutes a ‘valid’ mental health struggle, nor toxic beliefs about self-worth being defined by performativity and productivity to shape me. I choose to shape myself by prioritizing my mental health, and I have brilliant potential to shape my future by imagining how I could integrate being a mental health advocate with my career. I plan to obtain a Masters in environmental science and establish zero-waste farms in food-insecure communities, teaching the people there how to grow their own healthy food. When working with these communities, I hope to be able to start conversations about mental health. I want to impart awareness of how all dimensions of a person’s health are connected to their mental health, so healthy eating and exercise are essential, in addition to cultivating vulnerable relationships with people who encourage you to learn from your struggles. Someday, I would like to sit down next to a child on a farm we are using our very own hands to build, and tell him that he matters. I would tell him that, just as I hope to bring a farm to his community to support his bodily health and prosperity, I also value his mental health. When he asks why, I will share that it is because I understand firsthand the pain of struggling with mental health, and want him to know that he is not defined by his pain: he has the power to define himself.

Where does the will to change come from? Is it a personal decision, a collective movement, or, perhaps, both? As an activist, I have often experienced a deep disappointment and frustration with the apparent lack of willingness people have toward change. Through my experiences working as the director of Holland, Michigan’s hub of the Sunrise Movement, a national organization dedicated to climate and racial justice, I’ve learned that tangible change is derived from personal and collective willingness to learn about where we can find the will to change inside ourselves and inspire willingness in others. In September 2019, as a freshman in high school, I made my “debut” as a climate activist leading my city’s Climate Strike. As I stood on top of a park bench and addressed a crowd of almost 200 people, I could feel the power of my voice bolstering the energy of the crowd in preparation for the march. I could feel the power of collective voices from diverse backgrounds coming together when, during the event after the march, speakers, poets, artists, and musicians I had brought together conveyed their deep passion for climate justice. Fast forward to a year later, I founded Holland’s hub of the Sunrise Movement and began organizing around multiple initiatives involving protest, community education, materials management, and policy change. Recently, I created a framework of tangible strategies that can be applied to Holland’s Community Energy Plan in order to significantly reduce Holland’s carbon emissions to 50% of 2020 levels by 2030. These experiences in different types of activism informed me of the key components of the will to change: presenting people with a reason to care, conveyed through community education; practical individualized actions, such as participation in materials management programs including composting and recycling; and tangible actions for municipal, state and federal governments to adopt, such as strategies which empower these governments to reduce their carbon emissions. However, there is a type of will to change which is often overlooked by activists, and that is not the will of individuals, communities, and corporations to change their behavior, but our own will to change ourselves. When COVID-19 hit, my activism was largely stymied, because of the imposed hiatus on school, local government operations, and in-person gatherings. During this time, I experienced severe mental health issues, because my life had been so totally centered on activism that I had forgotten how to care for myself and invest in many aspects of my personal life. As I processed the emotional toll activism had taken on me, I realized I had internalized beliefs about activism which I needed to become willing to change in order to be able to live fully and be optimally effective as an activist. To me, the will to change myself means unlearning the idea that being a successful activist means achieving maximum productivity. It is not only permissible, it’s essential to take breaks and do enjoyable, playful things with one’s time, in addition to activism, because this is what sustains health. Building relationships is also indispensable to an activist’s work, because we find the will to change and grow through relationships with others, who reflect ourselves to us. It would be hypocritical for me as an activist to insist that others change their behavior if I am unwilling to examine and allow other people to critique my own behavior and the self-harm it may be perpetuating. Of all the things I have found valuable about working with the Sunrise Movement, the most valuable one is that the style of activism they empower youth to adopt focuses on motivating us to invest in inner change so we are better prepared to shape social change. That is why I am intentional about frequently introducing self-reflective conversations in my Sunrise hub, and encouraging my hub members to build relationships within and outside of the hub that allow them connectedness and introspection. Ultimately, finding the will to change precipitates tangible change, because it inspires us to look inside ourselves and grow, and this process in turn enables us to be activists who can inspire willingness toward change in the people around us. I want us to tear through the social fabric of America to reveal the systemic racism, socio-economic inequality and overly-extractive capitalism engrained there. I want us to begin to sew a new social fabric that addresses the traumas of oppression and its violent history, uplifts disenfranchised communities, invests in people over profits and empowers us to mobilize together to defeat the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced: climate change. The will to change required for this is a personal decision and a collective movement which begins with cultivating willingness to change in ourselves, so we can then inspire willingness in others.

“The world is held together… by the love and the passion of a very few people” (James Baldwin). One of the greatest essayists and novelists who ever lived, African-American author James Baldwin, delivered these words with a passion and an authenticity which evoke a deep sense of connection in me to the world around me. I believe that one of Baldwin’s greatest gifts was an empathic ability to provide a means for people to examine their experiences and, thus, learn from them. He achieved this through language: Baldwin wrote about the social, economic and spiritual realities faced by black Americans, shared profound personal narrative articulating his experience of witnessing racism in America; and, with an eye shrewd precisely because it aimed to see both the people behind systems and the systems behind people, Baldwin helped white Americans interrogate the roots of white supremacy in themselves. When reading his novel, Just Above My Head, about Arthur, a young musician endeavoring to succeed professionally, I learned that empathy is at the heart of loving relationships and of social change. Arthur knew this because he was a gay, black man with a dream; he was responsible to that dream, to all of the people who supported him in it and to the oppressed community of black Americans he belonged to. He struggled mightily to resist the weight of oppression and still live compassionately: Arthur is a reflection of Baldwin himself, who understood the rarity of love that is unapologetic in its relentlessness and wrote of love as a tremendous responsibility. As a young person striving to shape social change, Baldwin has inspired me to be one of the people whose love and passion hold the world together, willing to confront the responsibility of basing social activism in empathy and adopt it.