All through my life I’ve been bullied. It’s been a rough life, I’ll be honest. Being bullied by people I called my friends and people barely knew. I never understood why I had been treated like this. I didn’t understand why I could keep a friend and when I had no friends, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t make new friends. I was bullied for being gay and being trans and being weirder than normal people. I didn’t realize this is why people were so rude to me. I thought I was normal. I thought I could make a decent friend. But no. I was different. People are scared of different. I didn’t want to be different but I didn’t know how to be normal. I tried to act normal and act like how others did. I tried to mimic them. It never worked. I realized when I got to high school it wasn’t worth it. Maybe it was because I got friends. But I realized I shouldn’t try to be normal. So I stopped trying. That’s also when I realized I wanted to be an author. I wanted to write books for people. Books were my only friends sometimes. I wanted to make people smile like I smiled at books. I want to write experiences that people will understand and enjoy and feel connected to. GSA club really helped me realize why I wanted to be an author. GSA has made me feel so comfortable in my skin. I’ve felt so alive and normal even though I am different. I felt perfect, finally. GSA has made such a good community that I love. The reason I should win this scholarship is so I can write for the people. So I can help people like books have helped me. That is why I want to win. I want to live a life of service to the people by helping them. Being a silent support as they read through my works and being lifted up. I might not be able to physically help but words can go a long way. If I didn’t have people’s word to help bring me along to who I am today. It’s a service I can give back to the people, giving them a way to connect with themselves and with others in the world. Words can change the world, even if it doesn’t seem like they can, they really can.

All through my life I’ve been bullied. It’s been a rough life, I’ll be honest. Being bullied by people I called my friends and people barely knew. I never understood why I had been treated like this. I didn’t understand why I could keep a friend and when I had no friends, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t make new friends. I was bullied for being gay and being trans and being weirder than normal people. I didn’t realize this is why people were so rude to me. I thought I was normal. I thought I could make a decent friend. But no. I was different. People are scared of different. I didn’t want to be different but I didn’t know how to be normal. I tried to act normal and act like how others did. I tried to mimic them. It never worked. I realized when I got to high school it wasn’t worth it. Maybe it was because I got friends. But I realized I shouldn’t try to be normal. So I stopped trying. That’s also when I realized I wanted to be an author. I wanted to write books for people. Books were my only friends sometimes. I wanted to make people smile like I smiled at books. I want to write experiences that people will understand and enjoy and feel connected to. Arts are something I’ve always have had a passion for, drawing, writing, photography. I’ve always had respect for them more than most subjects. When I realized I wanted to be an author, my respect for writing went up. The passion had grown for writing as well. Each day I would dedicate a bit to writing and I didn’t feel ashamed, I felt thrilled, I felt happy. I felt connected to the arts in a way I had never felt. I could place why in all honesty. I just felt a connection to writing and I knew I wanted to spend every day doing it. GSA club really helped me realize why I wanted to be an author. GSA has made me feel so comfortable in my skin. I’ve felt so alive and normal even though I am different. I felt perfect, finally. GSA has made such a good community that I love. The reason I should win this scholarship is so I can write for the people. So I can help people like books have helped me. That is why I want to win.

I think STEM should stay as STEAM. I’ve always learned it that way. The arts are important and through my life I’ve realized that. All through my life I’ve been bullied. It’s been a rough life, I’ll be honest. Being bullied by people I called my friends and people barely knew. I never understood why I had been treated like this. I didn’t understand why I could keep a friend and when I had no friends, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t make new friends. I was bullied for being gay and being trans and being weirder than normal people. I didn’t realize this is why people were so rude to me. I thought I was normal. I thought I could make a decent friend. But no. I was different. People are scared of different. I didn’t want to be different but I didn’t know how to be normal. I tried to act normal and act like how others did. I tried to mimic them. It never worked. I realized when I got to high school it wasn’t worth it. Maybe it was because I got friends. But I realized I shouldn’t try to be normal. So I stopped trying. That’s also when I realized I wanted to be an author. I wanted to write books for people. Books were my only friends sometimes. I wanted to make people smile like I smiled at books. I want to write experiences that people will understand and enjoy and feel connected to. GSA club really helped me realize why I wanted to be an author. GSA has made me feel so comfortable in my skin. I’ve felt so alive and normal even though I am different. I felt perfect, finally. GSA has made such a good community that I love. The reason I should win this scholarship is so I can write for the people. So I can help people like books have helped me. That is why I want to win. I’m going to use my talent to help inspire people and make them feel wanted like how books made me feel wanted so long ago. I think I can help people by writing. I feel like I have a chance when it comes to writing. That people will understand the message I’m trying to pass along and people will want to embrace the message. That’s how I’ll improve the world with my skills. Thats how I’ll help the world, one word at a time

I’ve been a fan of Olivia since her Disney channel days. Granted, when she started to make her own music, I didn’t realize it was her at first, but when I did I was shocked because I realized someone I had grown up was still important in my life. To this day, I’m inspired by Olivia and how far she has come. Working at places like Disney can be hurtful and can damage reputations and I’m glad she was able to get out free in a way, making her own path for herself. I remember when Guts released I was there. I hadn’t had much to look forward to that year so seeing an artist I liked put something out felt like snow in hell since I felt like I hadn’t had anything good in a while. I listened to it immediately and fell in love. Get Him Back ended up becoming one of my favorite songs real quickly. Though the song was about a romantic relationship I could relate it to a bunch of friendships I had. That probably isn’t unique, this song appeals to a lot of people but it struck a cord with me in the right way. It made me happy. It made me feel seen even if the song wasn’t about the hardships of friendships. When the song came out I was dealing with a bunch of toxic friends. The lyrics “ Do I love him? Do I hate him? I guess it's up and down If I had to choose, I would say right now. I wanna get him back. I wanna make him really jealous, wanna make him feel bad. Oh, I wanna get him back. 'Cause then again, I really miss him, and it makes me real sad” hit that spot with me. My best friend had been talking bad about me behind my back. I ended the friendship but every day I thought about how much I missed him. I thought about how I wanted to scream at him for being terrible to me when all I did was support him. I wanted to hug him and cry and ask if we could be friends still. I wanted so many things. I tried to explain this feeling to friends and they didn’t get it. Was I just weird? I didn’t think so. They didn’t seem to mind brushing off their crappy friends though. I was scared though. Scared of losing those close to me. So listening to ‘Get Him Back’ made me feel seen.

Education has always been important to me. Between me and my siblings, it seems as if I always cared the most. My family tended to joke around with me, calling me the family nerd. It never bothered me, I just appreciated going to school, learning new things. I think having close friends made school important and why I always wanted to be there. However, I always just kept the title of the family need because it clearly made my family smile and it made my parents happy to not have to worry about one of their kids grades, since as they put it, I was so excited for homework. My favorite part of school was English. I love reading. To this day. It’s been engraved as one of my top habits and people tend to know me for my love for books. My love of books have come so far, I decided I wanted to be an author. English has always been my favorite class for the analysis part of it. The answers are subjective, unlike classes like math or science. Those were never my strong suit. English was my breath of fresh air. Where I could be able to say anything and make it feel write. The stuff I learned I started to apply as I read. I was so excited to learn more and more throughout the years and being able to apply it to my reading and eventually my writing. People could read it and they could understand what I wanted but they could make a correct meaning, one that meant something to them. English has always been so fascinating to me. Always my best class, the one I excelled in. The older I got I also started to realize why learning these things can help you in the real world. You need these analytical skills in the real world, to understand how it works and what is happening. It isn’t good to go into the world blind. It’s scary and they don’t tell you what to do. Being able to analyze what is happening and why it’s happening makes the world a bit less scary, makes it feel more manageable. Reading made me realize how you need to be analyzing everything, including the world. It’s something I wish I learned earlier. English and reading taught me analyzing and what to analyze. Who is suffering, why, how can I help? I kept looking, more and more to understand. And I think, I’m now able to analyze as much as I can and help everyone I can. So with my education, I want to be able to write for the people. I want to show the world through my books, even if it’s fantasy. I want to show how you can help, what is happening. Why it’s happening. How to make everything fair for everyone or least make it so we can try and become together in a world. I hope my books and writing can connect people together and help them all.

Sophomore year was the worst year for me. I struggled finding true friends and wanting to get up each day for school, hockey and everything else I had going on in my life. I want to just lay down in my bed and die most days. I knew it was unhealthy but I didn’t have much to look forward to in sophomore year. Junior year was the complete opposite for me. I loved waking up school and my mental health felt amazing for the first time since 6th grade when COVID hit. What changed? I gave up trying to be perfect. Junior year was hard still, but it didn’t feel like it affected me as much as sophomore year did. I finally changed my mindset to being able to realize I should just be myself. That mindset feels cliche, something you’ll hear out of a movie or a tv show, and it is. Ergo, I don’t think it would work but in junior year I let myself be myself. In 6th grade, my friends slowly started to bully me, and it made me wonder if I deserved friends. That year COVID also happened, so I was isolated to my house unable to try to make new friends. When I went back to school in 8th grade, I made a facade of myself because I wanted to stop being bullied. I took what other people liked and applied those traits to myself. I found some friends but I felt like I was lying to them. I wasn’t true. I was what I wanted them to see. I kept this facade up for freshman and sophomore year. The fear of being bullied by my own friends ran deep, so if they talked about something that was ‘nerdy’ or ‘cringe’, I had to act like I was normal. That I wouldn’t dare step outside the box that most people had to be in my eyes. In sophomore year, this earned me a ‘friend’. They were great, but really he just used me to do his assignments and have someone always be on his side. I feel for it hook line and sinker. In junior year, he stopped talking to me. In October I realized he didn’t care for me but I had friends who did. Friends who wanted to know about me. So I finally let myself be free. It made junior year the best year for me. It made me realize how much I wanted to be an author, which I repressed because it seemed like something a loser wanted to do. So now, in senior year, when someone asks me what I want to do, I proudly say I want to be an author. It’s my future, why shouldn’t I be proud of it? Being an author also made me realize I can help people who have dealt with trouble like me through my stories and characters. That idea made it all worthwhile. When I told my friends that I wanted to be an author, they were happy for me and I finally realized I did have true friends. People who love me for who I am, not what I am or what I can do for them. The ideas that they’ll leave me come back sometimes, a fear that I suddenly won’t be good enough and I’ll suddenly lose my support. My anxiety has been getting worse these last few years. However, I have learned to talk to others when I need it and that’s something I’ll keep doing. I have learned how to use myself and others for support and as the years go by, I will keep doing what I can, taking breaks, listening to my body for what I truly need.

I have always been enamored with books and reading. My brothers weren’t big into it, but I was. It led me to wanting to become an author so I can help people who have faced struggles like me find themselves in these books and find comfort in a character they can relate to. If I didn’t have reading I’m sure I would have gone insane at an early age. It was my only comfort. I always felt like a glass child so I took books as my friends and used them to escape the harsh realities I had to face. School wasn’t much easier with the bullying that I endured there and the struggle to make friends so I looked to book while at school, making friends with the teachers instead of the students. COVID hit and it was even harder to make friends being stuck inside. Like most of my life, I used books as an escape to the hell that was the outside world. Even now as a senior in high school, I’m grateful to be able to lean on books as something to make me feel free. In 3rd grade I thought picture books silly. They were for kids. Then in 7th grade I got big into manga and graphic novels, which one could say are picture books. They changed my life. Telling new and refreshing stories I hadn’t seen while show casing glorious art. For a while it made me want to go down the path of graphic novels instead of novels. I have sensed realized I would be better with normal novels but the impact was never lost on me. There’s so much you can show and I will always find enjoyment in manga and graphic novels. It seems as I get older, picture books expand. There’s so many that I want to read, even as a 17 year old. They teach lessons that I should have been taught and can deal with subjects like racism and homophobia in these kids books in a way they can comprehend. It’s amazing and beautiful to see how everything has changed, trying to make every generation better. The picture books I had told me not to steal or lie, while important didn’t show me the cruelty of the world. Now they do, but in a way where kids can still have hope for the future. They can look up and believe, then they try to help. Something I wish I was given as a young child.

Identity has always been a struggle for me. Trying to fit in with others in a society that doesn’t allow anyone else to be different. When I was a freshman, a boy I thought I was good friends with bullied me for being bisexual and struggling with my gender identity. Even worse, the girl I was dating was one of his best friends. I felt so betrayed since I had known him for a few years now, we called almost every day, we helped each other in class. We had a bond and I thought our friendship was unbreakable. When he kept saying all these rude and nasty things to me, I did my best to brush it off, thinking he would never mean these things, that this was some prank since he always said he loved dark humor. It never got better. My friends would point it out. Saying how he was only hurting me. Trying to be friends was getting me nowhere and giving him the leverage he wanted over me. I stopped caring about him until a bunch of my friends had to do a project together that included me and him. While we were together he was mocking me and my current partner. Talking about how we’re a sin and how we’re going to go to hell for just being ourselves. I was glad I stopped being friends with him. I felt bad for thinking that but this hatred wasn’t something I wanted in my life. A friend got mad for us and snapped at him, calling him homophobic and asking how he could possibly be happy bullying two people for simply living their lives. I’ve never been happier to have good friends who stick up for me. In freshman year, I also discovered I had a passion for writing. I had always loved reading, but I never thought I could be an author until that year. Then after that experience I realized why I truly wanted to be an author. I could try to help people. If I was younger and knew how the world acted, maybe I would be more prepared and ready for it all. Maybe I wouldn’t have let it gut me like it did. I want to be able to speak out and show people that they truly aren’t alone. These experiences happen but you are always stronger than them. I want to be a fantasy writer. I’ve always loved fantasy, getting lost into the worlds. Fantasy that had real world problems mixed into them always stood out to me though. Just because the world isn’t real doesn’t mean the impact can’t be huge for the readers. I want to make an impact in the way other authors could. Fantasy and the real world are often intertwined and I want younger readers and older readers to realize when reading my work that it can get better. That you will always be stronger than whatever you face.