The first time I witnessed a manic episode I was six years old. My maternal grandmother had one in a grocery store, loud, escalating, and completely incomprehensible to me at the time. I just knew something was wrong and that nobody was going to explain it. Nobody did. And I never saw her again. Mental health was not discussed in my family, on either side. My paternal grandmother has bipolar disorder and is treated. My maternal grandmother has bipolar disorder and is not. My dad, despite being surrounded his entire life by women navigating this condition, does not believe in mental health as something requiring intervention. My mom, after a difficult experience with medication as a young person, wants nothing to do with it. The message I absorbed growing up was clear: you handle it privately, you push through, and you do not give it a name. I am twenty three now. I am in that same grocery store several times a year. And I recognize what I saw at six. Being diagnosed with bipolar disorder did not come as a complete surprise, but it still required me to reckon with something I had been taught to avoid. What made it harder was that the resistance did not just come from outside. It came from inside too. I am in therapy, and I have chosen not to pursue medication yet. Part of that is still being careful. Part of it, if I am honest, is the fear of losing something. People with bipolar disorder often describe their highs as the source of their creativity, their drive, their spark. The idea of medicating that away is not a simple calculation, and pretending otherwise does not help anyone. But I also know that hesitation has a name. It is stigma, internalized so thoroughly that it starts to sound like self-awareness. Sitting with that tension, between what I know intellectually and what I feel instinctively, is part of the work. It is also, I think, part of what this scholarship is actually asking people to talk about. My grandmother and I have never spoken since that day in the grocery store. I do not know her, not really. And somewhere in that absence is the cost of silence, a relationship that never got the chance to exist because nobody knew how, or was willing, to build a bridge toward it. I think about that when I think about what stigma actually takes from people. It is not just treatment. It is connection. I am pursuing a career in law because I am interested in systems, how they function, who they serve, and where they fail. Mental health is one of the most visible places where those failures show up, and I want to be someone who works in that gap, whether through policy, advocacy, or representation. More than that, I want to be someone who does not repeat the silence. The conversation Ethel Hayes deserved, that my grandmother deserved, that I deserved at six years old standing in that store, is one I intend to keep having.