Seven hundred eighty-eight miles from home, I clutch the sweaty hand next to me tighter as my unicycle tire six feet below me slowly rolls over another insect with a sickening crunch. Making bug-jam isn’t what I expected when I heard that my unicycle group—The Woodside One Wheelers— would be performing in the 2017 West Virginia Strawberry Festival parade. The surplus of cicadas is thanks to a once-in-seventeen years phenomenon, the “cicada year.” A deafening buzz fills the air as they emerge from their larval state, and layers of the insects coat every surface in sight.  The air is laced with pollen and humidity, blood pounds through my body as my heart works to keep up with my pedaling legs. The formation is tight and laborious, my thighs ache from sitting on the hard leathery seat. Despite this, I smile, waving to the crowd. Behind the discomfort of a performance, whether it be the below-freezing temperatures of the Philadelphia Thanksgiving parade, the weight of twenty-thousand stares at the NBA 76ers Halftime show, or the popcorn crunch of dead insects beneath my wheel now, I find joy in my success. Encircled by a crowd, trapped upon a one-wheeled contraption with no handles, brakes, or gears, I am perfect. I am free. To the children in the audience, I am defying gravity. Their eyes gleam, silently hoping a rider will display a trick. But behind my confidence, the possibility of change flutters through my mind. Fear of failure is too ever-present to manage a disruption in my routine, keeping me in formation, never straying out to try something new. The false freedom I experience through perfection blinds me, obscuring the opportunities taking a risk would present. For years I’ve latched onto the ability to control every aspect of my life in order to avoid a change requiring a difficult decision. I ignore the wordless request of my admirers and look forward. The end of the parade is a mere fifty meters away. Cheers erupt to my right, so I turn my head, waving. In the moment of distraction, everything disappears. The joy I feel from perfection overrides the sting of sweat in my eyes and bug guts decorating my wheel. The smiles of adults and children alike make the countless hours of practice for perfection worth it. Yet even endless practice cannot prevent every mistake, and smiles cannot pave roads. My wheel dips sharply into a large pothole, and the impact thrusts my body off my unicycle, six feet to the ground. Falling is a common occurrence, and I know how to protect myself from the unforgiving pavement. However, despite my preparations, I have suddenly fallen victim to West Virginia’s public enemy number one. In this instant, I am facing my worst fear: imperfection. The stress of dealing with an unprecedented obstacle makes my throat burn and my eyes water. The crowd’s cheers have silenced. But at this moment, the most peculiar thing happens. My eyes dry, I swallow the lump in my throat and an odd sense of clarity takes the place of fear. I’ve fallen. I’ve messed up the performance. There’s nothing I can do about it. I realize it’s impossible to keep riding, but I can still move forward. I grab my unicycle and sprint alongside my peers. My feet pound the pavement, and the crowd cheers louder than ever. Every step brings me closer to the end of the parade and farther from my constricted past. I’ve fallen into freedom. True freedom. A freedom to be my imperfect self, not dependent on flawlessness to be successful.

As a child, I avoided the traditional scene at Christmas. Seeing gifts hidden under layers of sparkly paper elicited extreme emotional anticipation, and I couldn’t help but wonder why the gifts had to be wrapped at all. It would be so much more practical to know what was inside without going through the dramatic practice of peeling back paper as family members watched over my shoulder. It was frustrating being unable to control what I might feel, so I developed certain coping strategies. Staring at a nearly blank wall doesn’t seem like a particularly fascinating strategy, does it? Well, depending on the feature of the wall that classifies it as only nearly blank, it can be an enriching and satisfying experience that brings me peace when my emotions get too powerful. Whenever I find my brain overstimulated, I like to transfix my gaze on a word. It could be an advertisement at an airport gate or just a few letters on a blank wall. I begin by mentally carving the word up into thinly-sliced portions, one letter each. After the deconstruction, I rebuild it, scrambling the letters and sticking them back together until I discover a combination that yields a new, unseen, but an existing word. While simple, this activity helps keep overexcitement at bay and yields a healthy dose of satisfaction. I feel a small sense of accomplishment discovering a word within another after reducing it to its bare bones. Creating written work gives me a similar feeling. Writing involves identifying the potential of a blank page or empty computer screen and coaxing the envisioned piece into reality. Much like words on the walls, the material is already there in my mind waiting to be drawn up from the depths. It is up to me to envision what lies below the surface of my observations and thoughts and bring it to life on the blank page. I’ve discovered that exploring and shaping the potential of ordinary experiences excite me across multiple areas of my life. I view my potential as a writer in the same way. While I may not see where the pieces fit together right away, over time, through the practice of visioning, outlining, writing and revising, the words and pictures in my mind will bring forth stories and essays. It brings me peace and joy and satisfaction when I'm able to bring forth a story out of thin air. I’ve outgrown most of my extreme childhood mood swings, but the pattern of restricting my visible emotions continues. At first, I believed it to be an effect of the people around me. I would cry when I scored goals in soccer, hating how the crowd took sudden notice of me, even though deep inside I was glad to score. Recently, I even found myself pausing in the middle of my stairwell as I prepared to announce my SAT score to my father. To cope with the moment of sharing my news, I stood in the dark, dropped the smile from my face, settled my heartbeat to assure myself I wouldn’t experience another spike of excitement, and then I informed him. I’m learning that it isn’t the presence of others that leads to this response. Rather, it’s something deeper and connected to anticipation and emotions. Like the gifts under the tree, I become all wrapped up, but in the mystery of emotion, not wrapping. Writing for me is like unwrapping a present. Somewhere between anticipation and illumination writing helps me cope with a little loss of control, I'm more present and confident when I'm writing my own story.

It’s 5:30 a.m., and I run the sandbars exposed at low tide at Pine Point Beach in Scarborough, Maine. The reasons I run here are complex. Earlier this Spring, the Army Corps of Engineers dredged 130,000 cubic yards of sandy sediment and deposited it at the other end of the bay near the mouth of the Saco River. The sand they removed from “the gut”, the narrow navigation channel in the Scarborough River, will help protect ancient ocean-front homes near Camp Ellis in Saco, Maine. These homes are disappearing in powerful winter storms that batter the shore. But now it’s August, and I’m running towards the persimmon sunrise so I can be first. First to the farthest sandbars, and first to spot the huge moon snails that have become exposed and vulnerable due to abnormally low tides. The size of baseballs, I hurl the few precious snails I find as far as I can into the ocean. I’m trying to protect them from harvesters that decimate the local population of these slow-moving prehistoric creatures. The harvesters are cunning and entrepreneurial, they see the snails as valuable delicacies for export to foreign markets. These enormous gastropods are unlike anything anywhere, at least to me. They are part of the ecosystem, they help make this place special and imagining them on ice crushes my soul. Climate change, engineering, immigration, the economics of supply and demand, government, cultural differences and shoreline conservation - these concepts intersect in my mind. My thoughts about the snail are complex and interdisciplinary, and this is how I want to train myself to see the world. This is why I want to continue the marine research training I experienced as a part of the Bigelow Ocean Labs BLOOM program, and pursue environmental science in college. At this intensive week-long program in Booth bay Harbor Maine, I learned the basics of collection, close observation and analysis of the very small organisms in a professional lab setting. This experience inspires me to want to learn more and to help better understand the complex issues that our coastal communities face. Being from Maine we're steeped in real debates between the traditional lobstering communities and the plight of North Atlantic Right Whales. I don't want to see either go extinct, and while I don't claim to have the answers to this, I know that scientific research, a listening ear, and a goal to share the planet so we can all thrive is a start in the right direction. I feel a degree in environmental studies or biology will help me use the power of Scientific Inquiry to further a mutually beneficial future for a bio-diverse ocean, sustainable fisheries, and a recreational environment where anyone who wants to can enjoy the ocean and shoreline sports activities. I realize that this takes advocacy and forward-thinking public policy. I will use my training and influence to help further progressive initiatives to keep healthy ocean access a reality for future generations.