My grandmother, eight-year-old sister, and I live in a fourplex in the flatlands of Deep East Oakland. My sister’s and my parents are homeless drug addicts who exited parenthood many years ago. My parents, grandmother, and I once lived in a beautiful red house in a quiet Livermore neighborhood. My parents were joyful and in love. My mom was a nursing student and my father a tattooist. When substances entered our parents’ lives, everything fell apart. The breaking point was when my father stabbed my mother twelve times and went to prison. For the next six years, I was homeless with my mother in the streets of Livermore. Eventually, my grandmother got guardianship of me. Once my sister was born, my grandmother also took guardianship of her. Eight years later, us three live in the depths of poverty where many folks of similar trauma have let their shattered dreams consume them. I stand at Bancroft Avenue, waiting for zooming cars to finally stop so I can cross the fifty-foot street. There is no walk sign button. Here is where the streets are littered with trash, potholes riddle the streets, and the street lights don’t shine. A mile away is the Catholic private high school I attend, located in the beginnings of the Oakland Hills. There is where the streets are clean, there are no potholes in sight, and people drive nice cars to and fro. My family doesn’t have a car. Once we did. It was an old, gray, busted-up car that got us from point A to point B until it finally grew too old to function. That was nine years ago. We’ve walked ever since. Every weekday I trek up the ever-increasing hill to get to school. At the beginning of my high school career, I despised this walk. I was aimless, lacking an overarching purpose for going to school rather than to merely do it. Now I accept it wholeheartedly. Civic engagement sparked that acceptance. Living in a nation where the status quo of excessive individualism plagues the youth, I’ve recognized the sacrifices I must make to reach my nobler self. Gaining experience with an education outside of school based on self-transformation and community organizing has caused me to see that the conditions I’m under are examples of a larger, worldly struggle against injustice. I’ve given up habits that historically have kept me and many others mentally enslaved. I no longer watch TV, or play video games, and have given up scrolling on social media. When I am in a room of people, I speak to them. I do not utilize my phone as an escape from reality. My pastimes consist of studying the international movement for social justice and journaling to better my self-actualization. When I walk up that hill, knees popping from past injury, stomach empty from no breakfast, mind uncentered from waking up to screaming at home, I envision the positive change I’m accomplishing for humanity. When it rains, I show up to school soaked and with a smile. When it's sunny, I show up to school soaked and with a smile. When I’m sore, I show up to school more sore and, you guessed it, with a smile. There’s so much work to be done for social justice. I commit myself to unapologetically representing who I am so that other people in society recognize their own potential for keeping hope alive amidst times of chaos. My feet stand at the front gates of school. My body is drowsy with a pumping heart. Time to get to work. I cross the threshold.