I am determined to pursue a career in nursing, ultimately becoming a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, motivated by a desire to impact others positively. This ambition stems from my personal experiences and belief in the transformative power of compassionate care, especially within a healthcare system that imposes financial barriers. Living with Bipolar 1 Disorder and recovering from an eating disorder in a Latin family has profoundly shaped my life. These challenges also exposed the difficulties of navigating a healthcare system that demands both resilience and financial resources for expenses my family often lacked. Multiple hospitalizations and intensive treatments highlighted the importance of reducing healthcare costs for underserved populations, further fueling my commitment to advocating for access to care. Academically, I excelled in my early years. However, by middle school, bullying, and family struggles led to a decline in my focus and a sense of inadequacy. My dream of attending college as a first-generation student seemed distant. Yet, I sought help from a school counselor, which led to therapeutic programs that helped me regain emotional stability and academic confidence. While these programs were vital for my recovery, they also exposed the high costs of mental health care, raising questions about its accessibility for others in similar circumstances. This experience deepened my passion for advocating for broader access to mental health services, especially for marginalized communities. Determined to continue my education, I returned to public school for my senior year and graduated, reigniting my passion for learning and further shaping my vision of helping others overcome challenges. I'm now pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Nursing at Adelphi University, taking the first step toward becoming a nurse practitioner. I chose Adelphi for its supportive community and small class sizes, which foster personalized learning. Additionally, I was granted full admission to the Atlantis International program, where I will shadow doctors in underdeveloped countries, gaining a global perspective on healthcare challenges. I am also enrolled in a Harvard Medical course, which will further prepare me for my future career. Balancing academic responsibilities with financial challenges, including tuition and healthcare costs, remains a significant hurdle. Economic hardship is not an abstract concept for me; it is a lived reality. Even with health insurance, out-of-pocket expenses add up, motivating me to advocate for systemic changes that make healthcare more affordable for all. Outside of academics, I'm deeply involved in personal growth and community engagement. I have participated in student government, written articles on stress management for my university’s newspaper, and reconnected with my faith through active participation in my church. These experiences have given me a strong support system and strengthened my desire to help others. I have come to understand the importance of holistic care—addressing not just physical and mental health, but also the social and financial factors that influence well-being. Reflecting on my journey, I am proud of my resilience and growth. The challenges I have faced have taught me empathy and the importance of seeking help when needed. These lessons now shape my vision for the future, where I will combine clinical expertise with a commitment to advocating for accessible healthcare. In continuing my education, I aim to be a nurse who understands the complex challenges patients face, including economic burdens. By addressing these issues, I hope to contribute to a healthcare system that ensures no one is denied care due to cost. My journey has reinforced the need for quality care as a fundamental right, and as a future psychiatric nurse practitioner, I am committed to helping my patients thrive in a world where mental health care is a right, not a privilege.

I would like to live in a future where I can positively impact others. This is why I am pushing myself to pursue a career that would allow me to do exactly this. I have chosen to become a nurse, with my ultimate career goal being a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner. I made this decision after undergoing my share of life and being a first-hand witness to the effect caring people can have on an individual's well-being. As a person who also lives with chronic psychiatric and physical illnesses, I will utilize my past to approach my profession with empathy. When I was still in high school, I’d initially missed a substantial amount of school due to flare-ups and symptoms that often required hospitalizations and intensive treatments. After having been switched to a therapeutic school towards the end of my freshman year for continued individualized care in an educational setting, I began to engage in what are now my proudest accomplishments. Rather than sulk on my circumstances, I decided to make the most out of what I had and actively participated in the opportunities this school had offered me. This included working in a “No-Charge Thrift Store”, where I gathered clothing donations, ensuring over 100 at-risk adolescents had dresses and tuxedos for the Prom 2023 season. Additionally, I have simultaneously been an assistant animal therapy caretaker where I would administer daily hikes and trips to nearby nursing homes, daycares, and centers for adults living under the autism spectrum. Around this time, I had also begun reflecting on myself and looking towards the future, and eventually chose my career as a nurse as it was nurses who helped me when I needed it most. While my reasoning for continuing education was to initiate the process of eventually becoming someone who helps other people, I first had to acknowledge that I could not better others without bettering myself first. That is why I faced life head-on and fought illnesses. This paid off, as I had recovered enough to return to public school for my senior year. By this point, I had already increased my grades. I hold no regrets or sadness about the way my life played out as my treatment was futile and it led me to find my true purpose as a helper. However, healthcare is costly, even in situations where it should not be so. Rather than saving money for college, my family had been saving money to pay for my medical treatments. As a result, I was forced to take out $31,000 in private and federal loans to afford to attend college for a Bachelor’s in Nursing this year as a freshman at Adelphi University, even with financial aid, as well as taking up a job as a Registered Behavior Technician and currently looking for an additional job for more hours. With the money I would receive if awarded this scholarship, I would save it up for my next academic year. This lessens the amount of work I would have to do to prevent taking out another loan, as well as allow me to prioritize my academics more than I already do.

My ideal bookshelf would give me every reason to keep going. I remember that at one point, I hadn't read through and finished a book in years. Contradictory to who I used to be, whose go-to coping mechanism was gliding their pointer finger under the lines that scripted their imagination and an escape to another world, just to feel the page's texture. The kid who would look at their future self with a face that could only be meaning to ask one thing: "What happened?". Truth be told, I wouldn't have answered my younger self's question as to what exactly occurred, because reading was among the many pastimes I gave up and I simply would not have the energy or focus to tell her why. I was 15 and even though my pre-teen years weren't so far behind me, I had trouble remembering them. I struggled to remember most things. There were times I had forgotten to bring my backpack to school. Or times when I was buying something at the store and after paying, I would leave without taking what I had bought before someone called after me to pick up whatever I had left. Once there was this huge sale going on and the supermarket was packed, so understandably, no one had called after me because of all the chaos the overworked cashiers were undergoing, leading to the embarrassing yet grateful encounter I had when the kind, elderly woman who was behind me in line had caught up to me to hand over my milk and apples right before I crossed the street. Concentration was a virtue that no longer belonged to me. Due to those occurrences, people must have thought that my head was blank. It was quite the opposite. My mind was ridiculously busy, with worries and multiple trains of thoughts clashing with one another. All I could do was think and worry, which contributed to the exacerbation of my existing depression and anxiety. No one on Earth can do everything at once, so when it came between thinking and being present at the moment, something had to give and my mind chose to keep on sprinting while efforts in life slowed down to nothing more than a leisure walk. This affected my entire being, and in turn, led to me giving up books. No longer did I turn to Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley at Hogwarts nor did I call up the Baudelaire family to help fix my series of unfortunate events because instead of the protagonist, I felt like an insignificant bystander in my own story. One day I was mindlessly scrolling through TikToks on my phone as I had nothing else to do when I landed on a book review for "The Midnight Library" by Matt Haig. The reviewer confessed their love for it and described the main character, who was a woman who was lost in life and filled with regret, leading to her suicide attempt, which thankfully failed after her unconscious journey consisting of living in books that held all the different lives she could have had instead. I already felt connected to this character, so I requested the book from my local library. I hadn't read in a long time, however, upon opening the book, I could not close it. I laughed and cried with the once-motivated Nora Seed who was learning that as long as she was living, she had another chance. That her brilliance didn't need another life so it could shine through. Thanks to BooKTok, I began to try again, harder than I ever did before.

My mind is a moving picture I will never fail to have front-row tickets for. I even have a designated seat that could be anywhere I'd like. It can be my school gymnasium, where I sat alone in criss-cross applesauce on the grimy floor for attendance, hoping my name was on the class list sooner rather than later. Or when I was heading back to my father's apartment when one of my "home-away-home" therapeutic programs was on break, and my chosen space was in the back row of a raggedy, funky-smelling van that the head director had rented out at the last minute so she could close the campus for Christmas. I took advantage of rare moments when I could have my mind to myself, allowing me to pretend that I had a fantastic explanation for the instability and hardships that come with life. I distracted myself with intricate scenarios and hopes of dreams coming true as a way to not immediately come around to the fact that attendance sheets usually weren't updated in the middle of a semester. Or that within a week, the same bummy van would send me back to the unwelcoming place I'd come from. Through the gift of perseverance given to me by God, I tried my best to cast out any pessimistic thoughts or outcomes about my situation. I instead permitted my creative train of thoughts to flow wildly, so freely that if someone had poured paint on the tails of them, they would leave behind thousands upon thousands of frantic and vibrant streaks in its trail. With my imaginative brain as its canvas, I let the stories create an abstract work of art that from afar, seemed incoherent, but from up close, were intertwined. Even those stories that weren't so otherworldly and could occur in this bleak reality equally offered the much-needed reconciliation with the world I had gotten from the latter. For most of my life, I'd been occupying the only cinema chair for these narratives, treating them as sacred media that could never be for the public eye. Instead of speaking aloud, I put pen to paper and allowed writing to become a personal medium between my mentality and reality. It was only in recent years that I've begun working up the courage to share my work with others. The sheer vulnerability that came with sharing them frightened me, and to be frank, it still does. However, the difference between the past and the present is that I had once thought sharing these stories only helped me, for making them public would strip them of their importance. In these moments, I thought back to what God had told Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9. He told him, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness". This statement broke me in the best way possible. For much of my life, I believed the only way to be considered strong was to stay quiet. Shutting others out was all I'd ever known. Despite my fears, I finally shared my writing with a few trusted teachers and close friends because I grew to realize that doing so would only make my work more meaningful. God put me and everyone on this Earth for a reason. Using His purpose, I'm making another attempt to grow and continue my journey to share my stories and open up more cinema seats aside from my own. As well as taking another chance as I continue living in this world without stopping, even after I'd once thought giving up was the only option.