Someone who made a big and meaningful impact in my life was my high school English teacher, Melissa Applebee. She's a big advocate for student's mental health and ran our Gay-straight-alliance, which I was the president of. My friends and I would often go to her classroom in the mornings just to talk to her for ten minutes before we had to head to our first period. I am still in contact with her and she is one of the sweetest, kindest, and most caring people I have ever met. When we read books, she really made me think about characters from other perspectives, even in senior year after we'd read the book, A Man Called Ove, I was given the choice to write an essay about the book based on the idea that Ove, the main character, possibly had autism. She was there for my friends and I constantly when we were struggling, oftentimes more than our own families were. She was the epitome of a safe space for us, and I really do aspire to be like her. I'd like to be a temporary space for them to feel safe the way Melissa Applebee was for me. I want to be just as patient and understanding as she was, and I want to be just as kind too. Moving further, I want to specify that I plan to work with children in particular. I'm not 100% sure what specific field I want to work, but I plan to work with children with autism, at least as an overlapping group overall. I think I will work in child welfare in some way, possibly with DCFS if I can, and want to have proper training with special needs children, as stated before, particularly autism. I know that many social workers, particularly case workers, don't always have proper training with special needs individuals. This can cause bias in the case reports and a misunderstanding of a child's distress as a tantrum or general bad behavior. Autistic children particularly are more likely to have a report made and are more likely to face maltreatment overall. If I can be one more person who is able to better understand these children and prevent the abuse or neglect they face at home, or even in the child welfare system itself, than I can be fulfilled in my work as someone who wants to make their lives better.

Mental health is important to me, from a student view in particular, because people and their problems matter and students tend to have a lot of problems going on. Be it simple issues, ones in their personal lives, physical issues that lead to mental problems, financial burdens; there's so many possible problems a student could have that lead to worsening mental health. Personally, I don't know a single fellow student who hasn't experienced depression or anxiety recently, if not are actively diagnosed with them and going to therapy. Just according to the fall NCHA data reports that 30% of us are negatively impacted by their academics due to anxiety. That's a lot; it's over 104 million out of 349 million and nearly 2.5 billion out of 8.3 billion. That's a lot of people, it's nearly 1/3. No one wants to feel that way and I'm sure if you asked any of the students surveyed in the fall reports they'd happily get rid of that anxiety with next to no questions asked. This is why we need to advocate for it; everyone does. Mental health programs are always in jeopardy of being defunded, despite their importance to every single person. If advocacy stopped, I'm sure it would be even worse off, and that's why we need to advocate. The world never got anywhere good by giving up or giving in. People gain rights and freedoms because they refuse to stop advocating for what they believe is right, and the same is true for mental health. People will mental health issues used to be treated terribly; locked away, killed, and even lobotomized. But we've made so many strides the last 50 years because we kept advocating for better treatment of individuals with these issues. I will not be one of the people who is content to sit back and potentially watch these laws and rights ever be reversed when the people before me have worked so hard to get us there. Personally, I was a Life Saver in high school, and I learned a lot about mental health and how to talk to people with those types of issues when they're struggling. We did community work and I will forever be grateful I got a chance to be a part of such an impactful organization. When I become a social worker, I particularly want to work with struggling children, be it in a medical, juvenile, or home setting. My hope is that once I get the chance to work with them, they'll have a better chance at working through the mental health issues they may have and will have the tools to help manage it. In summary, we have made great strides in mental health fields and rights, and I never want to see that possibly get taken away. I want to do my part in preventing that and helping people with their own mental health issues, and I hope for an eventual carrier where my advocacy can be put to even better use.

My mom and dad were separated from the age of one, due to her finding out he committed a horrible crime she never knew about. While sometimes I went to his house on weekends, it was rare and he was in and out of jail. My mom wasn't helped by her poor connection to some of the rest of her family, including her dad, who I didn't know until I was four years old. I won't discuss the events of my mom's life that have led to it, because it isn't really my story to tell, but all things considered, she's never had the best mental health. She may not realize it, but I have watched her suffer from horrible anxiety and a lot of OCD-like tendencies, along with the seasonal depression. The ways she deals with these issues, I imagine due to the denial of them, is through smoking and alcohol. She's a great mom despite these things but I have seen her struggle and wished I could help her more as her child. She doesn't struggle as much now but between the ages of 18-45 I think she did a lot. I think watching my mom struggle with her mental health and the poor ways she copes with it have played a big role in my interest in pursuing social work. I want to help people, and ideally as I want to work with kids, I'd like to help them before they hit the poor circumstances my mom was in by the time she was an adult living with my father. I don't want people to spend thirty years of their lives struggling like I've seen not just my mom, but many other family members I've had struggle through. I think if I was raised with my mom not being a single parent my entire childhood, I would be a very different person. Maybe I would still want to help people, but it would probably be in a different way. Any future where I get to help struggling children before they hit adulthood is a future I want. I don't know precisely what I want to do yet, but I know I want to help kids, so they don't struggle like my mom did with my deadbeat of a father as she did the years leading up to when I was born and continued to struggle afterwards. I just want to know I helped in a way that really affects them, and that someone was impacted by my actions and choices in a positive way. Aside from that, whatever else happens in my future will be perfectly fine by me.

I was raised by a single mom with a very low income who had never been married in her life. My dad also had little money and I only saw him every other weekend, as he was not very present nor was he a good dad. I love both of my parents even if they are not always the best, especially my dad, but he is not the focus of the essay as he has not been present enough for me to write about. My mom has never had a very good support system and being a single parent raising a little kid on a very low budget did not help her mental health situation. Maybe being in a single-parent household hasn't been the specific thing to affect me, but growing up poor with a mother who has little to fall back on in cases of emotional issues has definitely impacted me in a way that I wouldn't have been if my mom had been able to be with a mature person who could help support us. I have seen the ups and downs of her mental health and wish she had had a better support system and more resources to get help when she was struggling on her own both emotionally and financially. I think seeing my mom's mental health during my life has been one of the things to push me into wanting to go into the mental health field. I want to go into social work, possibly at schools, to help children who might not be in the best circumstances. I also would like to do more charity work or donate when I am older and have more resources and money. I want to help as many people as I can, because these days we all need as much assistance and help as we can get with the economy and community we have. People need to be able to foster a community of caring friends and neighbors who we know we can lean on, and I hope to somehow help that idea become a reality again in a world where we are so disconnected. I have no doubt that growing up seeing my mom struggle has really impacted my path in life a lot and I have no doubt that if my mom had more people in her community to fall back to that we would have been much better off.

My favorite aspect of Minecraft is the building. I absolutely love building in Minecraft as it lets me utilize my creativity in such a way I would never dream of in most circumstances. I’ve been playing Minecraft since I was around seven and as long as I can remember I have always loved building over anything else. I can still remember my first ever build on my old tablet in fact. It was a brown stained clay(now known as terracotta in-game) castle in a flat world. I don’t believe I added much else to the castle before starting the rest of my town in that world though. Of course, I was seven or eight so it really wasn’t a great build, but it was so special I can remember it even ten years later. I do know that once I lost that original tablet and got a new one, I immediately started another town with a castle. This one was emerald and was definitely a little bigger. I remember that town a lot better, I spent hours of every day just building on it with my cousins. Nowadays, a lot of times I tend to sketch out my build on paper a bit before I actually get started which allows me to see the build in more than one dimension. Even the Minecraft content I watch is largely about building. I watch Hermitcraft, a large server known for their out-of-this-world builders. There are times I really have teared up seeing the beautiful builds others can create, and I strive to build as well as they do one day. I truly believe building in Minecraft has helped shape my artistic abilities over all these years. Minecraft and the building you do while playing really hold a special place in my heart.

Taylor Swift’s music has helped me through a lot of hard times and has especially helped me this year in particular. I’ll go over multiple songs in this essay, including “Shake If Off,” and “Wildest Dreams.” If I had to choose a song from Taylor Swift’s hit album, 1989, to describe my year, it would be “Shake It Off” first and foremost. The song itself is about trying to stay unbothered about the setbacks in your life and doing your best to rise above them. I feel that I have definitely been faced with that challenge this year, be it with hard classes, mental health issues, among others. This song in particular out of Taylor songs has helped me remember that it will only be a small moment in my life and that I’ll be able to get past it. It has helped me get past letting others' opinions negatively affect me. This song really is inspirational and calming, and even despite the fact I can not relate to every lyric in the way they were written, I can relate to them on a deeper level that allows me to understand Taylor’s struggle as well as my own. Even with that though, I do relate to certain lyrics such as, “I stay out too late, got nothin’ in my brain.” Obviously that is a stereotype that many smart and confident women deal with, and it simply is not true. “Shake It Off” allows me to remember that these stereotypes don’t matter and that I should just let them roll off my shoulders. Another song that I say could help describe my year is “Wildest Dreams.” While this song is about a dwindling relationship, I think it can apply to many other things in one’s life. Especially in the first verse, the lyrics, “Let's get out of this town, drive out of the city, away from the crowds. I thought Heaven can't help me now. Nothing lasts forever, but this is gonna take me down,” feel very reminiscent of my life this year and the decisions regarding what I plan to do with my life and the stress that comes with it. While Taylor worries about her boyfriend not remembering her after their breakup, I worry about how my friends may forget me once I move out for college or university. Overall I think these two songs in particular summarize my year so far very well. They can easily sum up my stresses and worries and tell me how I should move past them. I love Taylor Swift and these songs are a perfect example as to why.