In my family, mental health is not talked about much unless it was to a certain severity, one where masking was impossible. I had been curious about being autistic throughout my life, but when I attempted to talk to adults, it was dismissed as simply personality quirks, because it "wasn't affecting my life". However, it was, they just could not see it. I was diagnosed with autism as an adult, only less than a year ago. My sensory needs were something I never understood and would cause me great frustration, uncomfortability, anxiety, even sometimes physical pain in my gut. I have severe social anxiety my whole life which has made it impossible to make and retain friends, and have been uncomfortable with the ways in which I don’t understand the social dynamic and feel like I’ll say something wrong, which furthers the social anxiety and embarrassment. All I had that made sense to me was my education. School was all based around facts and sequences and cause and effect, it created patterns I could understand and it felt more simple than everyday life. Except for English, the abstraction of analyzing text had never been explained to me well throughout most of my schooling. I needed such thorough instruction to understand something being autistic and so complexity was very difficult for me if it was not detailed enough. It wasn't until sophomore year of high school where it clicked. My teacher that year was the first person in my life to actually break down the process of analysis and writing, and what made me realize I was actually really good at it, I just hadn't had the tools thus far to understand it. I now could say that I wasn’t just smart in math and science but dumb in English, my needs as an autistic student weren’t met until that moment. Now, as I have continued my education as a sociology major, I am very grateful the skills of writing and analyzing society around me has been cultivated in me as it has helped me understand my autism and understand the differences in neurodiverse and neurotypical. After I finish my Bachelor’s, I plan on going on to complete a Master’s to become a therapist where I will focus my efforts on the neurodiverse population and give students the help that I didn't have as a kid so that no one has to navigate the world alone anymore.

I attended San Jose State University right out of high school. In the Sociology program, I really loved my classes and teachers and enjoyed the friendly conversation in classes with my peers. The connections between all these people was my drive and motivation to continue, however, I was still struggling mentally with what I didn’t understand at the time was depression. Classes and connections gave me my purpose. So when COVID-19 required a quarantine, my depression only deepened. I was isolated from everyone, something everyone had to push through at this time. I did online classes for a while at SJSU, but I had a hard time focusing and completing work when it felt so robotic and impersonal with no peers to talk to, no friends to visit. This sapped my motivation to continue with school and May 2021 I stopped attending school to work on my mental health. When it was safe, I got a job that I worked at for three years and I connected with great people at a small company working in the warehouse. I began going to dance classes again, and feeling like myself. For those few years, I did some much needed focusing on me and I could finally readdress what I wanted for my future. I applied and enrolled in Southern New Hampshire University. It was online school again, but with all the connections I had in my personal life, it was easy to stay on track and find a purpose in my school work. This experience gave me an even greater purpose to pursue mental health as a career, I want to be a guide for those to find their connections in life that keeps them moving forward. Discovering or reigniting passions is so important to me and for me it has always been dance. These types of activities that feel too close to us to call hobbies is what I believe in as a piece of the puzzle to promoting positive mental health. I have made it my goal to continue dance throughout my career and hope to find other people’s passions as I work with them and create that tool for exploration, creativity, and connection. It was one of the few things that gave me a spark of life amidst the numbness of everyday life and I am grateful that it carried me through. These passions are what I would like to promote in school environments where competitiveness and grades are more important that having these outlets which is what breeds such poor mental health and self-esteem in students.

As a queer, disabled person, my mental and physical health is everything to me. As a child I knew things were different with me, but I didn't have the words or concepts to know exactly what. It was not only with not realizing I was trans and queer, but with having chronic pain since I was at least eight years old. No little kid has regular migraines and back pain, especially while drinking mostly water and going to dance classes since they were three years old. Physically, I should have been healthy and strong and the creative outlet and body control should have boosted my mental health and self esteem. And it did for a while, until I got my period. Not only was I having deeply uncomfortable gender dysphoria I wasn't even aware about that would made me sob the first time I saw blood on my underwear, but each minth it would happen, the already chronic pain would be amplified. I wouldn't sleep for entire nights, just crying and writhing in pain, sometimes so much that I couldn't walk. Meanwhile, in this amount of pain, I was still expected to attend school regularly as all afab people are expected to do, going to school or working full time despite sometimes being in so much pain people can vomit, faint, unable to stand up straight, etc. For me, though, the regular gender dysphoria at school was at a constant. It became harder and harder to relate to any of my peers, I didn't quite understand girls and I would only ever be seen as one to guys no matter how I presented. This persisted all the way until I was twenty one years old, when I had finally started hormone replacement therapy and I took my first self-administered testosterone injection. My period stopped coming regularly, and I was finally starting to feel like myself, mentally. In high school, I was dancing six and a half hours a day during the weekdays and between four and eight hours on the weekends depending on if we were practicing Saturday and Sunday. As an adult, I was no longer part of a school and outside competition programs, and having less physical activity so immediately took a toll on my body. My muscles had gotten tight to protect my hypermobile joints and now at twenty four the stiffness affects me everyday. Being in school now, I have a greater sense of importance of taking care of my physical wellbeing in order to maintain my ability to go to school anf achieve the goals I want to reach. As well, taking the time, to go to therapy, be with my partner, and go to dance as much as I am physically capable of still to protect my mental well being. As an online student working full time, I have to be very on top of all of this to make sure I don't fall behind in my schedule of work, school, dance, personal life, and appointments. It's a big challenge, but a necessity for me to continue feeling like myself.

I have chosen counseling and therapy because I want to make a difference in the lives of transgender and queer youth and adults. I had a lot of questions when it came to my identity and transition, and to make that so much easier for someone would be an honor. There are many people out there that celebrate and offer queer affirming care, but are not queer themselves, and that is a big help in the field, but sometimes its nice to know that the person you are talking to can relate and guide you through exactly what you are experiencing. That can make all the difference between someone feeling alone and feeling seen and understood. That is what healthcare means to me in a world that still greatly misunderstands and misrepresents queer culture and patients. I have gone through significant struggles myself in the healthcare world whether it was physical or mental care because people misunderstand my problems as related to taking testosterone for transition or estrogen blockrrs when my health problems existed before those two things. These types of things really wear on somebody's mental health and make them feel like they are the problem when that's not the case. Hate, ignorance, belittling or infatilizing treatment, and embarrassment or outings all culminate to the poor mental health of queer youth that carries into afulthood and its my goal to foster positive healing and respect for one's self in these people. It is a journey I am working on myself but that, I believe, makes me all the more qualified to aid in this field of healthcare. What is inspiring the modt about that is that I, too, can learn from my patients and their perspectives and experience since this field is not yet well studied and talked about. Things are constantly changing and we as people can never know everything, but I will make sure tyat I open my mind to continue to learn even when I am a professional, because that is how I can ensure that I am giving my patirnts the best care that matches each individual. This, I believe, will make me a very valuable mental health provider for the future of queer affirming care and this is always on my mind as I am completing my Bachelor's degree on my way to my Master's. Thank you for the opportunity to reach these goals.