Hello, my name is Laiken Martin, and I am currently going into my second year at Arizona State University as a psychology major. My long-term goal is to become a Marriage and Family Therapist. A couple of things inspired me to pursue this. The first was my own time in therapy. I did a lot of therapy when I was younger, and it really helped me work through my feelings. My therapist at the time helped me and my mom communicate better. My mom and I had a complicated relationship, and I didn’t really know how to express my feelings. Overall, we didn’t know how to communicate, and my therapist really helped us communicate with each other in a productive way. The second thing that inspired me was just the sheer number of relationships I saw breaking down between people in my life. In my opinion, relationships are the most important things for us, and I think sometimes people need help maintaining them. This doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships, but that is definitely one of the most important relationships someone might have. I think a lot of people, even more so within the Black community from my experience, doubt Marriage and Family Therapists or view them as a scam. I will never claim that there are no corrupt therapists; there are corrupt people in every industry, but I’ve seen firsthand the help they can give to interpersonal relationships. I’ve also seen relationships between others shatter because of a misunderstanding or just improper communication. I would love to be someone who could help people work through their issues so they can have stronger relationships. Humans are social animals, but that doesn’t mean we’re always good at talking. I think this issue is, in a way, exacerbated within the Black community. Men as a whole are often told not to express emotion or to always put up some veil of stoicism, and from my experience, Black men are told this even more so. I think this does so much damage to relationships because, to have true and honest communication with a partner, you need to be honest and vulnerable, something that so many men, especially Black men, are told they shouldn’t be. Vulnerability isn’t weakness, though. In fact, I believe it’s strength, and that strength can lead to some of the tightest bonds we’ll ever have. I would love to help men, and just people in general, see this so we can all communicate better and have more time to cherish our loved ones. I only just finished my freshman year but after taking my intro to counseling class I believe it solidified my ambition for helping people in this way.

August 8th, 2022, three days before the start of my sophomore year, I was in my room that night thinking about the first day of school, excited to see my friends and deciding what to wear. My mom had gotten home and she was crying. When I went out to see what was wrong she was on the phone with someone. She told me she loved me, and then told who was on the phone that I didn’t need her anymore. I should’ve thought that this was weird, or at least weirder than I thought it was, should’ve been more concerned. Truth is, my mom and I had a tough relationship, she was a single mom who struggled to pay the bills. Sometimes she’d take it out on me and I wasn’t always a good kid either. We didn’t know how to healthily communicate or even cope with ourselves about our own lives. My mom was suffering from depression for most of the time after I was born, which I didn’t know at the time. She would constantly make jokes about how when I moved out, she would end it, so when she came home crying and saying these things I didn’t take them as seriously as I should’ve. Later that night my mom, Michelle Martin, attempted suicide. She had swallowed as many pills as she could find, and whoever had been on the phone with her had called an ambulance as they showed up about 10 minutes later. I moved to my grandmas the weeks following. My mom was in the hospital for a month and a half before passing a few months later on December 23rd, 2022 due to the drug's effects on her body. I didn’t know how to deal with the situation, with losing the one person who had consistently taken care of me and never left my side. For those three months after her attempt before she passed I was so angry, how could she do that to me? How could she try to leave me? Was I not enough? I wasn’t shy about expressing my anger either. When she did come home I made it very clear how I felt. Not only because of her attempt but also because of everything we never worked through. The day I got the news I was sitting in my room talking to my friend when my grandma told me. She hesitated but when the words finally came out it didn’t feel real. It didn’t make sense that one minute someone who held your world together could be there and then be gone the next. My mom had gone to the hospital an hour before but I didn't think anything of it, I didn’t know that was going to be the last time I saw her alive. Christmas felt like torture, while everyone else was celebrating with their family, I was mourning mine. Once I went back to school I drowned myself in my social life. That’s how I dealt with every other problem so that’s what I did with my mom. I tried not to think about it, because I didn’t know how to cope with those thoughts. I didn’t know how to mourn and I didn’t want to learn. I pretended like I didn’t lose my anchor in life and talked to my friends about petty drama, the grades we got, their lives, anything if I could forget for just a second that my mom was gone. Nowadays I still won’t be the first to bring her up but I can listen to someone else talk about her without wanting to crawl out of my skin. Months after my mom’s passing one of her best friends gave me a scrapbook with pictures of her. I couldn’t open it at all for at least the first year after. I believe the next Mother’s day was the first time I opened it. I sat on the floor of my room and when I opened that book and saw that first photo I felt all the pain I had bottled up over the past come rushing out of me. Looking at each new photo felt like getting stabbed in the gut. I sat there, sobbed, screamed, to let the world know what they had taken from me. Afterwards though, a kind of clarity hit me, I wasn’t being stabbed, it was like my wounds were being sewn shut. It hurt, but it helped. Despite how terrible it is to lose a parent it taught me something about myself, and life as a whole. I got through something I couldn’t even conceive in my head. I did it, and still managed to go to school and still have a decent performance. It taught me that I’m stronger than I think I am and that I can make it through the harder parts of life. It reminded me that life won’t stop for us even when it feels impossible to move forward. It’s stressful but at the same time allows us not to drown in our sorrow. Grief isn’t easy and it’s true that it doesn’t go away. I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing my mom, but I can learn to still function with that. I can learn to be happy about the good times I had with her and be thankful I had them. Suicide is never the answer, you miss the potential of the better times. No matter how bad things get, eventually they will get better. There is always someone that will miss us if we disappear, even if we don’t think that’s true. I wish my mom knew how much I missed her. I wish she got a chance to see the better times. Even so, it’s important to learn not to blame the people we lose to suicide. What we can do is hug the people we have here a little harder and remind them how important they are to us.