"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark, that looks on tempests and is never shaken” (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116). Shakespeare is an often-studied figure in literature, but while many of my peers (including my own partner) despise reading such outdated lingo, I personally savor it. His words ring true. My partner and I have had our arguments as any long-term relationship experiences, yet the way we dealt with them was far more significant than the argument itself. The resolution proves our devotion and ability to communicate, just as Shakespeare expressed. Any artist requires inspiration, and my partner is my muse in all forms of art that I take part in. My love is not my other half. No, instead they are the other piece to a two-part puzzle- each whole on their own, but all the more beautiful together. Complementary, not unfinished. At this point, you might think I’m writing an essay for the wrong scholarship- one about the power or meaning of love, something of that sort. Rather, I am here to discuss my greatest artistic inspiration: Allie. The work that lies closest to my heart is the piece I call Cherry Tree. I say “I call” because it doesn’t have an official name; it’s not a standalone piece. Rather, Cherry Tree is the introduction to a series of works all put into one piece of interactive media: my videogame, Jae Hae Mara. Some context is required. Long ago, I began to work on my greatest passion project to date, Thaecia. It is a world of my design, one of dragons and wurms, magic and fantasy. An aspect of this world is the language that I created (known as a conlang in the worldbuilding community). “Jae hae mara” is a sentence in this language that means “I love you.” Therefore, the name of my game translates to I Love You. Cherry Tree represents this work as a whole. It’s the first thing the player sees, it’s the menu they return to every time they boot up the game, and it’s the first piece of art I created for Jae Hae Mara. The piece is done in a watercolor style (though painted digitally) that I believe expresses emotion and beauty perfectly. The game was originally a Yuletide gift for Allie, but due to unfortunate circumstances it is left in a relatively incomplete form and is under current development. Allie loves pink, and I wanted to create a piece to honor that and the beauty of our relationship, since that is ultimately what Jae Hae Mara is about. I believe I achieved that, and their delight upon seeing the title screen was so much more than enough to reward the work put into the project (which of course was in and of itself enjoyable). Love inspired the creation of Jae Hae Mara and Cherry Tree, and because of this Cherry Tree is my absolute favorite singular piece of art. It may not be my finest, but it certainly wins most meaningful. It is an ever-fixed mark- a piece I will return to time and time again. And it will forever hold a special place in my heart.

At my lowest, I never would have believed that I would be here, sitting at my family computer typing up a scholarship essay, believing in a bright future. The truth is, back then I didn’t think I would make it this far in the first place, let alone graduating from the most rigorous high school in the district with an alright GPA, accepted into a university that I am extremely excited to attend. I didn’t think I could be that excited about anything ever again. When you are severely depressed, even getting out of bed feels like a Sisyphean task. You’re pushing the boulder up the mountain just to wake up and go about your day. At the time, attending school was a nightmare. I felt I had no friends at school, my energy was abysmal, and to be candid, I wanted to fall asleep and never wake up. To rest eternally. The fear that my depression and anxiety instilled in my partner knocked some sense into me, and I managed to focus on self-care. Through hard work with medicine, therapy, and introspection, I managed to recover immensely. Today, I still struggle with depression, but it is much more minor. There are a lot of stigmas against debilitating mental conditions. Depression is often viewed as acceptable- normal, even- until someone deals with extreme conditions. Then they are deemed weird. Abnormal. Crazy. This stigma needs to end. If I hadn’t gotten the help that I did, if I had been treated as just another incurable, mentally ill psych ward patient (yes, I was in a psych ward for 5 days), I wouldn’t be here today. But I am. And I feel all the stronger for it. I used to think I was weak for going through what I did, for wanting to succumb to the lull of sleep forever. For harming myself. That was what weak people did, wasn’t it? Now I know that I am strong, stronger than I ever imagined myself to be. I know that I have made it through, all the while handling something that was given to me unwillingly. I want to use this higher education to help other people like me. I am going to study art and computer science, then, assuming I have the funds, I will go off to graduate school for video game development (I have an amazing program in mind- FIEA). I’ll likely work for a development company, but I’m not looking for the games I personally make as side projects to make me millions, or even thousands (that would be a nice bonus though). All I want is for something that I create to help someone out there. Someone like me. I am in a community for LGBTQ+ teens, and this program has helped me and my mental health beyond belief. I plan to give back to it by becoming a teen leader in my first years of college. I already do my best to act as a support for other queer youth. Beyond that, I plan to use my education to provide games for the underrepresented. I have an idea. A game, small and simple, about living with Social Anxiety Disorder. That is something that I also struggle with, and while I see a lot of media handling depression, I don’t see much on anxiety. I want to create a game that helps someone get through the day, knowing that someone else made a game just for them. Maybe, just maybe, with my education, I can create something that helps a person out there who struggles like I did.

When I was about 7, my dad tried to teach me how to code. See, he used to work as a software engineer and was very eager to instill a love of programming in his children. I remember him starting me out with “Hello, world!” But little 7-year-old Noah with grubby hands and the attention span of a goldfish simply wanted to go on his next epic spy mission or paint part of his next “masterpiece” before hastily dropping it without finishing. It was only many years later that I made my father proud in this regard and began to code. It all began with a game. I was an avid gamer as a child (and still am, though I have mostly turned my spare time to creation of media rather than consumption). There was this one game in particular that I loved with all my little child heart: Project Spark. It was a game... about creating games. Now, it didn’t include any actual coding, but it introduced me to the logic of coding. If-then statements. Booleans. The works. Even more importantly, it introduced me to telling a cohesive story through an interactive medium and the beautiful art of video game development. I never made anything outstanding with it- that was for later- but I made things that were mine. The most memorable story I told was of an astronaut from an advanced time period who had crash-landed on an alien planet, which was the typical high fantasy knights-and-dragons world. It was a blending of the two most popular fantasy settings. Another was about a tiny human in a giant’s home, where each of the giants acted differently towards the player (the tiny human). Later on, I began to explore true coding myself, beginning with lessons on Udemy about C#. I didn’t get very far before realizing that this is a very hands-on field; I couldn’t just watch videos about people coding and expect to be able to go and make something myself! And so with the baby knowledge of C# and an ambition to create came the integration of my primary hobby with coding: art. After all, the pieces fit together perfectly. My passion is art, I have a deep interest in programming, and I adore video games. Though, as you may guess, creating a video game is quite different from playing one. I used to make games for fun as a kid, now I make games for fun as a young adult! My current project is a gift game for my boyfriend. I love that I am able to bring my unbridled passion for art together with the boundless world of coding to create something unique, something special. I am currently an IB art student, and I am majoring in art and computer science to bring these vastly different worlds together. I have an idea. A game. A game where you play as someone who struggles with a severe social anxiety disorder. I grew up with Social Anxiety Disorder, yet I have only seen it majorly represented in media once, in a show on Netflix that I happened to find and immediately had to watch upon reading that it was about social anxiety! I want to bring representation to mental illness, both to educate those without and to give a sense of reassurance and belonging to those with them. And hey, maybe along the way, I can inspire a grubby-handed 7-year-old to realize that they can use the world of coding to bring their voice to the world, in whatever way they choose.

I was born in a world unkind to people like me. A world that hates difference. I was born in a world that told me who I was before even I knew. See, I am a trans man. Luckily for me, or else I don’t know what I would do, I am active in the community- I attend a group for queer youth each week. When surrounding myself with fellow transgender people, there is a feeling of comfort. Safety. Yet it’s also terrifying in a way that most groups don’t have to worry about. As of 2023, 81% of transgender adults in the US have thought about suicide, 42% have attempted (Kidd et al, 2023). Those are frightening statistics when you know several trans folks, because the more you know, the more likely you are to know someone who dies by suicide. But there is hope. By having communities like the youth group I mentioned, we are offered safe havens to be loved, to be ourselves, to be accepted for who we are- not what society wants us to be. Without the LGBTQ+ community and culture, I likely wouldn’t be here today to be writing this essay. I wouldn’t have met my lovely partner if not for the group that we met at. I wouldn’t have a place to go to escape the horrors happening in the United States and especially Florida right now. Further, I’ve been forced to hold a mirror up to myself, to see my own faults. I used to experience internalized transphobia, but I’ve since dealt with it and improved vastly since attending a Survivance group last year that taught me about resilience and self-acceptance in the queer community. The community has offered me growth, friendship, and the one dearest to my heart. I chose art and computer science because I want to create for those who don’t feel seen or heard. I refuse to let those who seek to erase me silence me. I refuse to become another statistic. Through the discrimination, misgendering, and taking away of rights, my voice has only gotten louder. With this voice I want to create for those who need to see themselves in media. When I was younger, there were no kids' television shows or movies with trans characters in them, and there certainly weren’t games representing me. It is my goal, my passion, to bring voices to those who feel like I felt. There needs to be more representation of queer folk, of mental illness, and of other topics, and I intend to bring this representation in the future. I am currently working on and am almost done with a gift game for my boyfriend, but my first planned commercial game is Paresthesia, a game about living with social anxiety disorder. I intend for there to be queer characters that represent the community properly, which is something that we are sorely lacking. Mental illness is rampant in the LGBTQ+ population because of discrimination and trauma, so this is another critical element that I want to show. I was born into a world that has tried to define who I am for me. But I have fought to define myself on my own terms. And I will continue to fight for those who don’t have a voice.

Is success the wealth and titles that we achieve? The goals checked off the bucket list? Is there a finish line that defines ‘success,' reached only when a condition has been met late in life? To me, success is about personal fulfillment. Now, that is a big statement, because what exactly is personal fulfillment? I think that each person goes on a journey to discover what fulfillment means to them. For me, fulfillment has been found in the past through leaving a positive impact on others. A kind word said to someone is meaningful, but what truly satisfies me is the creation of something that helps someone through something or expresses something in them. This stems from the artistic side that I have and how it has helped me through many difficult times. In a personal context, the visual and written arts have guided me out of struggles countless times. Now, through my higher education, I want to bring that joy and expression to other people. As an example, mental health is not discussed enough in media that we consume. As someone who struggles with both an anxiety and depression disorder, I wish that I had played more games and watched more movies about these topics. I would have felt seen, heard, and understood when I was younger. Now, though, I have the potential to create something for future kids like me to see that hey, you’re not alone in this, there are other people like you and it is okay to be like this. You’re not wrong. You’re not broken. This applies to more than just mental health. I am passionate about LGBTQ+ representation in media. In the same way with anxiety and depression, as a kid there were practically no queer characters in video games that I played or kids’ television that I watched. This is critical for kids to feel, again, not alone. This doesn’t mean the sexualizing that many people think it does. It’s simply about someone’s identity, and it doesn’t need to be made a character’s whole personality either, because in reality we are people just like anyone else. The reason I mention mental health and queer representation in media is because it is my dream to become a video game developer, and with every step I get closer and closer to that dream. I am currently working on a gift game as a side project for my boyfriend, and I will be studying visual art and computer science in university. This opportunity would fund my studying, allowing me to achieve my dream to learn the tools to develop video games that speak to people. I’m not looking to get rich off of the growing industry of video games. What I truly want is to use my artistic heart to give to the communities that lack enough representation in media. I would love to be the person that changes a kid’s perception of themselves for the better, to be the one who gives people now what I wish I had some time ago- media that speaks to them, that they can relate in a way that they haven’t been able to before. That is what this scholarship would do for me. I would receive what I need to continue an education that I would use to bring light to underrepresented subjects and people through one of the most beautiful interactive mediums: video games. I would love to be able to pursue my passion and attend FIEA at UCF after getting my bachelor’s degree. It is a nationally top-ranked video game development graduate program, and it’s my dream to receive an education there. I have an idea for when I finish this personal project: a game called Paresthesia, about someone living with Social Anxiety Disorder. This game will illuminate the issues and stigmas around anxiety disorders. More importantly to me though, it will offer people like me a piece of media to relate to, to know that someone out there made a game just for them, and people like them. Because they exist. They are not broken.

At my lowest, I never would have believed that I would be here, sitting at my family computer typing up a scholarship essay, believing in a bright future. The truth is, back then I didn’t think I would make it this far in the first place, let alone graduating from the most rigorous high school in the district with an alright GPA, accepted into a university that I am extremely excited to attend. I didn’t think I could be that excited about anything ever again. When you are severely depressed, even getting out of bed feels like a Sisyphean task. You’re pushing the boulder up the mountain just to wake up and go about your day. At the time, attending school was a nightmare. I felt I had no friends at school, my energy was abysmal, and to be candid, I wanted to fall asleep and never wake up. To rest eternally. I missed 24 days in one school quarter (that’s just over half the days). The only reason I haven’t been expelled, I believe, is because I worked with the staff to alert them to my condition. Despite that I managed to pull out of the quarter with only one D (the first I have ever gotten, and likely the last) and a couple As. The fear that my depression and anxiety instilled in my partner knocked some sense into me, and I managed to focus on self-care. Through hard work with medicine, therapy, and introspection, I managed to recover immensely. Today, I still struggle with depression, but it is much more minor. There are a lot of stigmas against debilitating mental conditions. Depression is often viewed as acceptable- normal, even- until someone deals with extreme conditions. Then they are deemed weird. Abnormal. Crazy. This stigma needs to end. If I hadn’t gotten the help that I did, if I had been treated as just another incurable, mentally ill psych ward patient (yes, I was in a psych ward for 5 days), I wouldn’t be here today. But I am. And I feel all the stronger for it. I used to think I was weak for going through what I did, for wanting to succumb to the lull of sleep forever. For harming myself. That was what weak people did, wasn’t it? Now I know that I am strong, stronger than I ever imagined myself to be. I know that I have made it through, all the while handling something that the universe gave me unwillingly. I want to use this higher education to help other people like me. I am going to study art and computer science, then, assuming I have the funds, I will go off to graduate school for video game design (I have an amazing program in mind- FIEA). I’ll likely work for a development company, but I’m not looking for the games I personally develop as side projects to make me millions, or even thousands (that would be a nice bonus though). All I want is for something that I create to help someone out there. Someone like me. I have an idea. A game, small and simple, about living with Social Anxiety Disorder. That is something that I also struggle with, and while I see a lot of media handling depression, I don’t see much on anxiety. I want to create a game that helps someone get through the day, knowing that someone else made a game just for them. Maybe, just maybe, with my education, I can create something that helps a person out there who struggles like I did.

I was a young child when I first discovered the joy of art. Back then, it held no weight- it was simply a hobby I loved to indulge in. Today, art means so much to me. It is a way to put my voice out there. It has helped me personally to get through difficult times in my life. An important, albeit unfortunate, part of my journey has been my mental health struggles for the past several years. I have dealt with severe depression that has hindered my academic abilities, personal relationships, and health. Despite this, my art has helped me out of the pit many times and I hope to help people with art just as it has helped me. My end goal is to join the growing field of video game development. I want to express myself through that beautiful and interactive medium that is video games. I gravitate to more impactful games or game scenes, which has inspired me to create similarly impactful and emotion-driven games in the future. Or even the present! I am currently working on a gift game for my partner, a game that means a great deal to me and that I have been working on for months now. It is incredibly cheesy, but it is my way of expressing my love for my partner. The development of my art skills is what allowed me to get to this point. I am doing all of the art on a digital art platform and implementing it into the game, which gives it that personal ‘Noah’ touch. It’s not just those in my personal life that I want to create for. I have an idea for an actual commercial game that I have been building on for a while and intend to work on once I finish my personal gift game. Its tentative name is Paresthesia and the concept is a game about living with intense Social Anxiety Disorder, as that is something that I suffer from. If I am able to open peoples’ eyes to the reality of anxiety disorders or, alternatively, offer a piece of media for those living with anxiety to relate to, I will be a happy person. Mental health is an important topic that I don’t see many video games exploring, and art is the perfect way to explore it. After all, isn’t a video game simply one big work of art? A conglomeration of visual art and handcrafted stories brought together by a little bit of science- programming. I truly have a passion for the arts and what they can do for those around me. They have carried me through difficult times and offered me a voice in the world. I will forever follow my heart. No matter where life takes me, what hurdles I must overcome, art will remain my guiding force- because, after all, you can’t spell ‘heart’ without ‘art.’