The summer before high school, I spent my days in the teenager's room at my town's public library. I was waist deep in summer reading. The books I chose that year were Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. These books became deeply personal. That fall I would be diagnosed with depression, making my connection with The Bell Jar all the more real. The next year, I was outed to my family and my classmates as queer, just like in Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. What I read that summer before high school became my reality. In a way, they prepared me for it. Since I read about them, I was no stranger to topics such as depression and being closeted. When it came time for me to experience those things, I was more ready for them. I cannot understate the ways that they comforted me. They showed me that other people had been through what I was going through, and survived. Until then, I had convinced everyone I hated reading. It seemed too personal, much more than I was willing to reveal. If people knew I read, much less what books I was reading, they would get a glimpse into the parts of myself that I had covered up. After that summer, I could not keep my love for books to myself anymore. I read voraciously—publicly. That summer changed my life in ways I cannot quantify. It awoke in me a burning love for libraries and the people working in them. It made me realize that my dream job is in a library. I want to help the community and provide the space that the library had provided me. Since then, I have not stopped reading. As a shy person, I credit the books I have read with shaping my conversational abilities. My beliefs and philosophies can all be found between the pages of books, with my particular fondness for Albert Camus. I have found a certain love for Moby Dick, Herman Melville's masterpiece. I finished reading it on my eighteenth birthday. When I was nineteen, I attended a read-a-thon at Herman Melville's house. I stood at a podium and read allowed Chapter 133: The Chase.—First Day to an audience who loved the book just as much as I did. I was touched by the significance this book had in all of our lives. It would be impossible to list the invaluable lessons I have learned from books. Remarque taught me about trauma. Dostoevsky taught me about love, in all its forms. Heller taught me about following your own morals. Books have shown me things that I would otherwise be blind to and situations I could never understand any other way. Above all, reading has taught me the ways people can be brought together between the covers of a book.

My first introduction to mental wellness came when I was diagnosed with anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder at eleven years old. I was ushered by my parents into therapy offices, which, as a child, I detested. The other kids did not have to go to therapy. I wanted to be like them. When I was fourteen, I was diagnosed with depression. The news was not well received. It was horrifying. My grandfather died by suicide, as did my uncle and great grandmother. It felt like my first step into the grave that had been dug for me at birth. Throughout my teens, I was in and out of therapy. I would see a therapist, start to see improvement, believe myself to be "better," quit, and eventually have a nervous breakdown. The cycle would repeat. I receded into myself, becoming agoraphobic. As an adult, I realized that that is no way to live. I understand myself to be someone who needs to be in therapy for the long term. This is why mental wellness is so important to me. Without continual attention, my mental wellness will suffer, and my disorders will be unmanageable. I remember all too well what it felt like to sink lower and lower into myself, scared of my own shadow. I have to fight tooth and nail to stay off that path. I had a hard time with physical health growing up. I was chronically underweight, uncoordinated, and too shy to play sports with the other children. At field day one year in elementary school, my mother said I had embarassed her with how poorly I jumped rope. For a long time, I felt that I did not have an athletic bone in my body. Besides, I was too preoccupied coping with panic attacks and obsessive thoughts. When I realized I was transgender, things were complicated even further. It did not seem worthwhile to take care of my physical health when I lived in a body that I hated. I could not have cared less what happened to my body. I remember behaving recklessly, passively allowing myself to become injured. It was a sort of punishment for the trespass of being born in a bad body. At twenty, I saw the light: I had top surgery. All of a sudden, my body was a temple. I taught myself how to do push-ups. I went vegetarian. I even started jogging through the neighborhood shirtless, my new scars on display for anyone to see. I finally felt like my body was worth taking care of. My mental and physical health are so intertwined that I could not uncouple them if I tried. Transitioning was the key that released me from the life I had been living, weak and miserable. I was no longer underweight. I had energy to go around. I felt happy for once. Life is worth living, life is worth looking after.