It’s always scared me a little bit to say what I want to be when I grow up. “I want to go into politics” is easy to say. Say it loud and it sounds pretty impressive. When I write down all the things that have to happen before I can honestly say it, it gets a lot scarier. A dream is lovely when it is vague; a plan is something else, plans can go awfully wrong. But I have decided to make one. My first step is to extend my internship with Senator Dylan Fernandes. I want to learn government from the least glamorous side of it: the paperwork, legislative research, meetings, constituent concerns, and canvassing. I also plan to continue Model UN and Mock Trial, where I am learning to research complicated problems, argue from different perspectives, and speak even when I am nervous. My first choice after high school is Yale; I know this is a lofty idea. Right now I’m an A/B average student, so I can’t pretend admission is a guarantee. Instead, I’ve been studying for the SAT, trying to get a 1500 or better. I will apply for financial aid, scholarships, and every opportunity that will make college affordable. I also have a backup plan. If Yale doesn’t happen, I can attend Cape Cod Community College while living at home. Books and supplies are estimated at about $1,200 a year, and living at home would eliminate housing and meal costs. I have already proven that I can contribute financially to my education. Working two days a week during the school year at Shaw’s, I have earned approximately $17,000 over the past two years. I plan to continue working and saving while I am in school. At Yale, the estimated yearly cost of my housing would be $12,080, food $9,520, and books and supplies about $1,000. Those numbers make financial aid and scholarships essential. My plan is to apply for as many scholarships as possible, complete the FAFSA, continue working when my schedule allows, and use community college as a lower-cost path if necessary. I plan to major in Philosophy because I enjoy questioning how people, laws, and governments should work. I think learning to look at difficult questions from different perspectives will make me a better future lawyer and public servant. After my bachelor’s degree, I plan to attend law school, take the LSAT, and pursue scholarships and financial aid. When I am a lawyer, I want to spend much of my career doing pro bono work. There are those who only run afoul of the law when they’re already drowning in it. I want to be someone they can stand beside. Eventually, I will run for public office. I would start with local or state government, learn how to be a responsible public servant, and work my way toward the Massachusetts State Senate. From there, I hope to work on education, the cost of living, and making the government more accessible. There definitely will be setbacks. Yale may not work out. My SAT score may not reach what I want it to be. I may have to change schools or take longer than expected. But the destination does not change just because the route does. Joe Gilroy kept his plan in his pocket every day. I will use his same mindset and apply it to my own life: plan the work, work the plan, and keep moving forward.

When I was ten years old, I understood that something was different with my Uncle Jason. During family visits, he would often sleep on the couch for most of our time together. As a child, I could not have explained addiction, dependency, and definitely not recovery. I only understood absence. My uncle was physically present, yet somehow impossibly distant. Jason began using drugs when he was very young. As a teenager, he ran away and embarked on a road trip across the country, eventually becoming entangled with the law. His addiction became more than a habit; it became a force determining the course of his life. He never attended college, and for many years, the future seemed to be something happening to other people. When I was about fourteen, however, he began to change. My uncle quit smoking marijuana and started to rebuild the aspects of his life that had been shrouded by addiction. But he didn’t want to let his past define him forever. He started building something new. In 2022 he founded LoBlast, a small independent company dedicated to creating low-fidelity experiences and exploring the strange intersection of retrofuturism and obsolete technology. It became an outlet for his creativity and proof that one can build a future from circumstances that once seemed to have eliminated one. The most profound consequence of his recovery was not professional. It was personal. I finally began to know my uncle. Today, Jason is married to my Aunt Sara, and their dog, Nitro, has become part of our family. What matters most to me are the ordinary things. Jason calls me over Zoom to help with my math homework. He plays video games with me. He listens to my ideas. He makes me laugh. The man who once slept through family visits is now someone I can depend upon. His recovery fundamentally altered the way I understand addiction. I once imagined sobriety as simply the absence of drugs. Now I understand it as something far more difficult and profound: the reclamation of a life. Recovery does not erase the past. It does not allow someone to pretend their mistakes never happened. Instead, it creates the possibility of becoming something other than the worst things one has done. That lesson has changed the way I think about my own education. My uncle never had the opportunity to attend college, but his life has taught me that education is not simply a credential or a pathway toward employment. It is an opportunity to expand the boundaries of what a person believes is possible. I want to pursue my education with that same determination: to take every opportunity I am given and eventually use what I learn to create opportunities for others. What strikes me most about Jason's story is that recovery did not straighten his past. His road remains crooked. The years he lost cannot simply be returned to him, and the decisions he made as a teenager cannot be rewritten. But perhaps that is not what matters. What matters is that the line continues. Bishop Mozell Haymon believed that “life begins with sobriety.” I have witnessed that beginning, and it has changed the way I understand resilience, possibility, and purpose. My uncle's recovery did not simply return him to the person he might have been. It allowed him to become someone new. And, unexpectedly, it gave me something too: the opportunity to finally meet my uncle. His story has taught me that a crooked line is not necessarily a broken one. Sometimes it is simply a line still being written.

I certify that I personally conducted the live interview described in my essay, and I confirm that the submitted photograph is an authentic, unedited image of me and the actual person I interviewed. I have read and agree to the Official Contest Rules. I certify this essay is my original, unpublished work, and it was not generated using Artificial Intelligence. I wanted to understand MAGA. So I found one sitting next to me in class. This might sound like the beginning of a terrible joke, but it morphed into one of the most meaningful political discussions I’ve had. My classmate Felix is a Republican in favor of MAGA. I'm liberal. Before I met him, I had spent much time trying to understand MAGA psychology from the outside, through political discussions, media, and my own observations. I hadn't asked someone who actually identified that way. We violently disagreed about politics, about government, about the direction the country was going. But what surprised me was how often we agreed on the things behind those political arguments. We both want people to be able to have basic necessities, safe communities. We both believe people should have a chance to succeed. We often disagreed not about whether those things mattered, but about what caused the problems we saw, and what should be done about them. That caused me to reconsider one of my many assumptions. I had sometimes thought of MAGA supporters as people deluded from political propaganda or people who saw liberals as an enemy of the state. Media and political psychology helped produce this polarization, but Felix was not a political theory. He was not a character on a TV screen, not a handle in a political debate. I saw him in class everyday;. I got to know him as a person before I got to know his politics. Our conversations changed the way I thought about political labels, too. Words like “liberal,” “leftist,” “conservative,” and “MAGA” can rapidly become huge buckets online. Words that cause such heated debates. People use them to describe people they have never seen. But Felix demonstrated how those labels can't tell you about a person. Two persons can be under the same political label, and have entirely different reasons for doing so. I also learned that listening doesn’t require me to abandon my own beliefs. I did not suddenly become a conservative and Felix did not suddenly become a liberal. We just listened to each other, listening to the other side of the political spectrum. The most significant lesson we took away from our discussions was that political beliefs don’t just develop in a vacuum. We all see the world through the lens of our own experiences: the communities we were raised in, the people we trust, the problems we have encountered ourselves, the information we have consumed. I was trying to understand political differences mainly in terms of ideology. Felix taught me to understand them by experience. Now, when I hear someone described as “MAGA” or “leftist,” I am more likely to wonder what that label actually means to that particular person. I still have strong political beliefs, and I still disagree with Felix on an abundant amount of issues. But I no longer see disagreement as proof that someone must be fundamentally different from me. Sometimes two people can want many of the same things and still see completely different paths toward them. For me, that is the difference between knowing someone's political position and actually knowing the person.