To me, no word describes the feeling of college more than "intimidating". I plan on attending Georgia State University Honors College, a college campus in the heart of a busy city, with stimuli everywhere, all the time. As a person who struggles with social anxiety, this is both exciting, and terrifying. In order to help ease my fears, I decided to take my trusty Pentax K1000 and a roll of film down to Atlanta one day, and photograph the area. I think my feelings about the campus came out in my photos, with my preference of full, geometrical compositions, with warped patterns and strong low angles. It showed me how small I felt in the city, and how the towering and dark architecture gave me an emotional vertigo. While this didn't exactly "reframe" my view of the city, it did help me to better understand it. It is intimidating, but I can capture that intimidation. If I can put it in a frame, its existence isn't as threatening as it is beautiful. Now, when I walk around the city and am stunned by the sheerness of the concrete towers all around me, I know I can decide what it is to me. It's just a piece of art. I'm not scared by it, I'm thankful for it. When I go to college for Film and Media, I hope to use this lesson to continue to better understand myself and the world around me, and to not let it make me afraid. As I continue to better understand photography, I continue to better understand myself.

Persistence has been necessary daily in order for me to become the person I am today. I am a trans woman, and I transitioned near the start of the COVID pandemic. It was and still is a very challenging process, and it required me being courageous to express myself as I wanted to be seen. While this journey has been massively beneficial to my mental health, it was a struggle to accept. I had to fight extreme social anxieties during the start of my transition, where I was so worried about how I would be viewed that even simple tasks like going to the mail box were terrifying for me. I had to confront this daily, and for a while, it seemed like this pattern of fear would never end. Eventually though, as I kept persevering through the anxiety, I began to be able to do more, and with less fear. Now, two years later, I am able to stand up to my anxiety enough to pursue my dream job by working on film sets, and even though I still feel that fear of judgment, my perseverance has given me the courage to push forward and accomplish my goals.