Having a career in the arts matters to me because I want to achieve what was once told to me to be the impossible. I come from a very strict culture, drowning in poverty and struggle, in which the career path of the performer wasn’t exactly a “realistic” one. For me my art, theatre, is my expression. My name is Leah La Borde and I am a bi-racial, first generation, sudo-domestic student who hails from the island of Trinidad and Tobago. I moved to New York City in January 2019 to pursue a degree in Communication Arts with a Concentration in Performance Studies at St. Francis College; with an overarching goal to become a performer on Broadway. Even though I was born here in New York City I do not have family in New York City and furthermore the USA. Very limited support systems prove to be a huge hurdle for my mental, emotional and physical health especially as I support myself but it remains worth it solely to serve the mission in accomplishing my dreams. There is nothing that I love more than the feeling of panic and complete stillness that washes over me as the stage lights hit. When I’m out there it’s just me pouring out everything I feel into rehearsed lines and blocked cues. I fell in love with this feeling at the tender age of 7 and knowing that love, that passion, there is nothing else I’d rather do. That’s why having a career in the arts is so tremendously important to me. To the child that can’t sit still and the one who’s head is in the clouds, creativity is an aspect of life that can be used not just for fun but to build a future, something that you can use to live the rest of your life. From the moment I realized that I wanted it, I wanted it more than anything, I wanted it to prove the people that told me that I couldn’t that they were wrong and most importantly I wanted it to be happy. When I was a child and I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I struggled in actually answering the question itself for a very long time. I simply wanted something that would make me happy for the rest of my life, something I’d do just because I enjoyed it and as I got older, I realized that money, status and everything else didn’t matter when choosing a career because a career is a lifetime’s worth of work culminating and circumstances aren’t always going to present itself to be good. There are going to be bad times and with those bad times I want to still be in love with my career. There was no other option, I am an actress it isn’t something I want to turn on when I go to work, it is a lifestyle a way of being that I want to embody every single day and that’s why a career in the arts is important to me because I want my professional life to reflect this, the passion that I feel for the arts.