For the majority of my life, I believed grief was the strongest, deepest, and most overpowering emotion a human could feel. How could I not? I was full of it. One of my most vivid childhood memories remains the image of 4th grade me staring over the railing of my school’s second floor and wondering what it would be like to climb over and jump off. In 5th grade, I promised myself if things didn’t get better I would call it quits at fifteen. I spent half my high school career stumbling around blind with despair, limping through my classes because, “It doesn’t matter, I’m going to die anyway.” I hardly remember a time in my life where I wasn’t crippled with anxiety and depression. I had no ambitions, no goals, and no motivation because in the back of my mind I knew I was going to die before anything could be achieved. I relied on this “the end is nigh” feeling to keep me from reaching for anything substantial. If I never reached high, I could never fall. To me, humans were lonely, hate filled, decrepit creatures capable of nothing but harm. I didn’t understand how happiness and love were things that people could chase in life, knowing they would most likely be disappointed. I didn’t understand anything beyond my all encompassing grief, it was practically all I had ever known. Subconsciously, in the back of my mind, I had begun to mourn the life I could’ve had if I had not been born as I was. It was my firmest belief that some people were meant for great, fantastical, joyous things, and some people were meant to choke and suffer on their own misery. I counted myself in the latter group. I grasped at any form of relief I could find, even if it stood as something fleeting and temporary. I buried myself deep in worlds of fiction and lived vicariously through the media I consumed. To this day, I think part of me was genuinely addicted to fiction, or at the very least the endorphins it supplied to me. Therapy was no use, it only confirmed what I already knew: I was broken and a danger to myself. My therapist was not a helpful woman, or maybe I was beyond help at that point. I found that she only told me what I already knew and no concrete way of fixing it. I wanted instant, gratifying solutions. For someone to peer in my brain, say, “Of course. This is what’s wrong! Everyone else had this removed at birth. We’re so sorry.” Rid me of the enormous ball of self-hatred inside my chest and compensate me for all my agony. Like, the clouds would finally part and the sun would come out and—there it is! There’s my happiness! Of course I’d never found it before, it was hiding behind all that gray. It took me realizing that nobody was coming to save me to begin to recover. I’m not even sure how I came to this realization, much of my memory is unfocused and forgotten, my mind still plagued with awful brain-fog to this day. But I know one day during my junior year of high school I realized that no one else cared. Not really, not in the way only you can care for yourself. No one cared, no one was coming to save me, so I looked up at the sky and parted the clouds myself. There was no hidden, eternal happiness hiding behind my mind’s expanse of gray, no eraser to all the scars I inflicted on my body. There was nothing in the sky but the sun. Instead, I found happiness nestled in little pockets of humanity. A friend, over thirteen hundred miles away, sending me a box of my favorite girl scout cookies. Working my first job and finding out that I loved, loved, loved children. Laying in the grass and realizing how blue the sky actually is. I think this is where it hit me, right in the center of my chest, that this is what life is for. To me, happiness is like secrets under rocks. When you lift one up all the bugs scatter and for a second, the happiness will pop out and shout—Here I Am!—and you’re left with this fuzzy, warm feeling that I think just comes with being alive. Happiness comes from the chase and not the result. The steady knowledge in your heart that you’re giving what you want a shot and there’s hardly a thing in the world that can stop you. Knowing that there are people all around you chasing that same high, and there’s community in that. There’s community in knowing you’re all on this wild, unpredictable journey humanity has coined as life together. That’s where I believe happiness comes from. Relationship wise, I always try to reach out to others. Though no one could save me, I still try to save others. Reach out in the way I wish someone had for me and offer just a bit of comfort, even if I could not be helped. I can now comfortably aspire and have goals without an underlying sense of doom. Currently, I’m torn between my deep love of writing and my passion for helping others. An author, or a doctor. Two careers on the opposite side of the spectrum, yet a bit of the same, too, sharing the common goal of loving humans. Finally, I understand that happiness is not something that is hard to obtain or impossible to find. Happiness is tied into love as much as it is in grief. You can’t have grief if you haven’t loved or been happy before. If you’re truly determined you can find it there, too. Happiness is not a finite thing or a substance you have to consume in increments. Let people be your place of worship, allow the clouds to part, and know that happiness is just one rock away.

I want to rebuild community as a whole. Modern society is very separated from itself. We lack any sense of community due to a variety of factors: no third spaces, social media, car-centric society, rising costs, and general hostility. All of these issues exemplify others, like sexism, racism, and homophobia. The bystander effect is more present than ever. Despite us being the most interconnected society ever, we are still very far apart socially. Small talk is becoming a thing of the past, everybody is afraid of one another. We are rejecting our natural state as social creatures and I aim to fix that. This spring, I got to visit the city of Philadelphia. I was blown away by people just existing. People walking to and from their grocery stores, riding on bikes, food trucks. There’s a video I have on my phone of sitting in a park while a man played piano in the background and people just—lived. Chalk drawings inside an empty, drained fountain. People gathering and leaving in groups. I even noticed three men I saw earlier in the day, looking for single slice pizza. This time, they had several pizza boxes in hand. It was the most together I’ve seen humans in years. Despite the rampant violence and crime, the City of Brotherly Love has earned its name well. Returning home to Dallas I was confronted with the stark reality that everything I had ever known, everything I grew up in, was muddled by distance. Sidewalks ended randomly. A store that’s fifteen minutes by car turns into three hours on foot. Even in the innermost city people drove rather than walked. Everything and everyone was far. I’ve abandoned my home city of Dallas to move to Philadelphia for college this fall—I really did fall in love with the city. I’d like to bring that same connectivity everywhere. Public transit, even though Philly’s own SEPTA subway is outdated. More parks, places people can walk to, and most importantly third spaces. Spaces where people can breathe and exist and take in the idea that there are other people around, living separate lives from them, but lives nonetheless. It won’t be a mission that starts or ends with me, there are already individuals advocating for the same thing I am. New York and Mayor Mamdani, for example. I hope that this dream of mine outlives me and spreads across the US, abandoning our distance in favor of loving each other. The first step is going to city hall meetings, knowing your city board, being well and truly connected with your community so you can better reach them. I’ve already had the wonderful opportunity to experience part of this by volunteering for the Dallas Forest Forward Theatre, a community effort to bring back one of the city’s most beloved theaters, while also bringing in new aspects to the original building, like art classes and a rooftop deck to bring back what humans truly long for above all else: connection.

The story that changed mine was not a person, but a people. In 2023, like most, I heard about the crisis of the Palestinian people in Gaza. The reality of their situation didn’t become fully realized in my mind until I saw a video of a man carrying the remains of his son—hands, legs, arms—in a plastic grocery bag, stumbling down streets of dust. Covered in his own son’s blood. His son, in a bag. My own privilege became startlingly clear to me. Somewhere in the world, there was a man carrying the body of his child in a bag. I got it in my head that as a human it was my responsibility to my fellow human to care for those worse off than I was. That video sparked a summer of insane, neurotic research on anyone I could find hurting. The children of Lake Lanier, the people of Congo, women so silenced even their sight was being taken from them, children in Africa so skinny their spines poked through their skin, their back bones forming angel wings. I found that America was the consistent cause of many of these atrocities. We restricted their resources, or we gave it to them only to snatch it away like a petulant bully. I felt terrible donating to organizations designed to help these people because I couldn’t be sure where my money was going. I agonized over the fact that I couldn’t do anything directly. All of my money seemed to go into a hole of suffering, one without a bottom, I never had enough to reach everyone I wanted to. None of my classmates seemed to care that there was a man across the world carrying his child in a plastic bag. My sickest realization yet came when I drove to the south side of Dallas, to volunteer at a local school, and found people suffering on every street corner. I had become so preoccupied with the man with the bag and all he represented in my mind, that I’d forgotten that people needed help in my own city. Thirty minutes down the road from me, two hours, ten hours, all across my state and the country. It was everywhere and unavoidable: from the homeless on the streets of Dallas to people stuck deep in impoverished, rural Louisiana, where nothing thrives except substances, religion, pregnancy, and more substances. I became so consumed with the idea of other people bleeding that I stabbed myself to bleed along with them, desperate to understand their pain in an effort to help. I was torturing myself with the knowledge of other’s suffering. Reluctantly, I scaled back my focus to people I could reach, literally. I figured if I could make a dent in my own community I had a better chance at helping the world. My senior year of high school was populated by obsessive volunteer work, anywhere I could find. At my local food bank, at schools, even just cleaning tables at my local senior living facility. I do have the resources to act, everybody does. I learned while volunteering that you don’t need a ton of money or influence to make an impact, just your own two hands. If that’s enough to help even one person, I would consider that mission accomplished. There’s nothing more I would love to do then snap my fingers and—there’s no more pain. But that’s a fantasy, and in 2023 I woke up to the reality that other people needed me. So I rolled up my sleeves, and put my hands to work.

Sharing about myself is probably the most difficult thing you could ask me to do. As both a writer and an artist, I have a tendency to put most of my efforts into telling the stories of others and stick my head in the sand when it comes to talking about myself. I believe it’s in my nature, as it is with most humans, to look to another before we consider ourselves. The latin word humanitas, which humanity is derived from, literally means kindness, culture, and courtesy. Compassion is wound into the very definition of our being. I’m someone who finds deep value in humanity and all that we do to both further and disparage each other. Really, I think it’s a bit of a miracle we’re conscious enough to even approach another person with ill intent. We’re the only species on planet Earth that’s capable of lying and trickery with a complex understanding of what we do to each other. In that same vein, we are the only species capable of inherent love and care that compels us to shield a child from danger, spite one in the name of another, and create art, our first true form of communication. An animal will covet another out of the need to reproduce and go on, but humans have evolved enough to display empathy. It’s this innate, biological care for another person that compels us to create and care, and obliges me to reach onward and connect to my fellow human. To create art that makes me happy and hopefully, one day, write something so full of humanitas it will cast a tear down someone else’s cheek.

I believe my “awkward thing” is that I can only shoot blind. For three years in high school, I was a member of my school’s uncomfortably small archery team. You had to like everyone, or everyone didn’t like you. I am, to this day, terrible at every other sport I’ve ever tried. Un-athletic to the point of humor, asthmatic, and nearly blind without my glasses. My prescription was so strong my eyes would balloon and bulge from the magnifying effect that my glasses imposed on my face. My cheeks looked chubbier, my eyes were huge, and my first two years of high school were spent utterly embarrassed to have anyone look at my face. I felt like a cartoon character, so, one day, I just stopped wearing them. I would rather walk around blind than face my peers in all my big-eyed glory. Naturally, I decided to learn archery blind, too. I started off trying to shoot with my glasses on but quickly found I was horrible at the sport. I could only land shots in the outermost rings of the target and stood consistently as one of the lowest scoring members of my already exceptionally small team. Which didn’t make me any less popular than I already was, but I needed the sport to collect P.E. credits without actually doing anything close to P.E, so I stuck with it. Archery, thankfully, is non-strenuous. There’s no running or jumping or anything that would make me wheeze and clamber for my inhaler. All you have to do is stand there, pull back a string, and aim. I couldn’t really do that either, but it was better than running. I don’t remember why, but one day I stopped wearing my glasses to practice. I assume now that my thought process must’ve been something self depreciating, along the lines of, “I can’t get any worse.” The very first day I shot without any sight was the first time I hit a round of all yellows and reds, the area of the target closest to the center and exactly where you want to be as an archer. Blind, I was an absolute natural. Turns out, I’m a “barebow,” or intuitive shooter. I rely on instinct alone to aim and any form of sight is a hindrance rather than help to me. It was this completely unique and otherwise useless ability, outside of archery, that carried me to the State Tournament, allowing me to win my first ever first place medal and eventually qualify my small team, for the first time in the school’s history, for the National Tournament. My half blind, forced barebow archery coach adored me for this. It was my initial aversion to look odd and wear my glasses that allowed me to discover this seemingly unassuming, awkward skill, and find love in something I’d always thought to be impossible: a sport. Today, as an incoming freshman to my dream university, I now wear contacts. I’m still poorly coordinated, asthmatic, and terrible at all other sports, but I’ve made many friends across my home state thanks to my travels to the state tournament, and I can now throw a ball accurately. Blind, of course.