When I was a kid– back in the good ol’ AOL dial-up days–whenever it was my turn to play on the computer, I would spend hour upon hour researching colleges and universities across the country. Dreaming of undergraduate seminars and the myriad colors of an idyllic campus, I imagined myself there. Reading, studying, writing, making forever friends, and landing a real job–something that no one in my family had ever done before. My family hails from a background of trauma, pain, and poverty. My family didn’t even work blue collar jobs; they did, however, work in sex work and drugs. My father was released from prison in 2020, and my grandmother died on medical clemency from a women’s penitentiary in Florida. I never had anyone to help walk me through the tediousness of completing the FAFSA, or dreaming big and applying to a prestigious university–I went to a community college instead. I lacked what researchers refer to as college fluency–the knowledge and set of abilities that enable students to effectively locate and use relevant college services. In addition, I worked three jobs when I was an undergraduate student, doing anything and everything I could to accommodate a full-time class schedule and to make ends meet. I did not know how to apply for scholarships or grants, or how to locate basic needs insecurity resources, or how to determine what I wanted to major in. I just trudged through, getting excellent grades, but not knowing what to do. Instead of substance use, sex work, and poverty, I work full-time as an Analyst at Ithaka S+R, where I conduct research focused on college students' mental health, basic needs insecurity, and barriers to educational success. I regularly interview adult learners about challenges related to mental health, housing instability, food insecurity, caregiving responsibilities, financial stress, and persistence. These conversations have strengthened my ability to build rapport quickly, listen deeply, and help people identify pathways forward when they feel stuck. Students that were once just like me. As an adult learner back in school myself, pursuing a graduate degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling, and as a researcher in the higher education sector, I hope to complete my practicum and internship at a college or university. I’d love to support college students, especially first-generation students, on their path to degree attainment. I am in a situation where I am paying for this degree out-of-pocket, and therefore cannot afford a full-time class schedule. This scholarship would help me manage a full-time class schedule. My dream extends beyond becoming a counselor. I hope to build a non-profit community mental health center that provides accessible, affordable care to those who might otherwise go without support. I envision a place where therapy, grief support, creative healing, and basic needs assistance coexist, creating a more humane and holistic model of care.

Growing up around addiction and substance abuse profoundly shaped the way I understand emotional pain, the difficulties of life, and healing. As a child, I did not yet have the language to describe what I was witnessing, but I understood that substance abuse rarely existed in a vacuum. Namely, it was deeply entangled with trauma, poverty, violence, shame, mental illness, and systems that repeatedly failed vulnerable people like my father, uncle, and grandmother. Addiction was not something distant or abstract in my family. It shaped relationships, altered people’s personalities, and influenced the emotional atmosphere of entire households. Because of these early, formative experiences, I developed a complicated relationship to trust and emotional safety early in life. I learned how quickly addiction can fracture families, distort intimacy, and create instability that children quietly absorb long before they fully understand it. At the same time, witnessing these patterns also deepened my empathy. Rather than viewing addiction through a moral lens, I came to see it as something profoundly human and often deeply connected to unresolved suffering. Today, being in a relationship with a sober person has further transformed my understanding of recovery. I have witnessed firsthand the vulnerability, discipline, honesty, and courage required to maintain sobriety. Recovery, I have learned, is not simply the absence of substance use. It is an ongoing process of rebuilding trust, reconnecting to oneself, and learning how to live differently. That experience has strengthened my belief that healing is relational and that people deserve compassionate, nonjudgmental support as they navigate recovery. These experiences have directly influenced my career aspirations. As a graduate student in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Western Illinois University–Quad Cities, I hope to work with individuals navigating trauma, suicidality, grief, and substance use challenges, particularly those who have historically been underserved or stigmatized by traditional mental health systems. I am especially interested in approaches that integrate trauma-informed care, relational healing, and community-based support. Ultimately, growing up in the shadow of substance abuse taught me how deeply interconnected mental health, trauma, and substance use can be. It also taught me the importance of compassion, boundaries, and hope. While addiction shaped my family history in painful ways, it also shaped my desire to help create spaces where people are treated not as failures, but as human beings worthy of care, dignity, and the possibility of healing. Perhaps importantly, my experience has shown me that substance abuse cannot be treated away by morality or religion; rather people need to be understood as whole beings separate from their problem or struggle.

I’ve always felt intimidated by artists and creative types. Art belonged to other people. A few decades ago, I was sent from my traditional high school to an alternative high school. You know the kind. The kind for the “bad” kids. Dealing with untreated and undiagnosed depression and other mental health related issues as a queer teen, I was essentially kicked out of my high school. My first year at this new school for "troubled" teens, I struggled in–and eventually failed–my art class. Always doubting my creative abilities, I sank deeper and deeper into a problem-saturated narrative of “I cannot make art.” Fast forward to present day, I, somewhat ironically, work as a teaching artist at the Des Moines Art Center in Des Moines, IA. I facilitate art classes centered on grief, mental health, identity, and recovery, and I have witnessed firsthand how transformative creative spaces can be. I have seen people who struggle to verbalize their pain create something that communicates exactly what they are carrying, honoring the people they have lost. In these moments, art becomes more than self-expression. It becomes connection, regulation, witnessing, and healing in real time. Put simply, art has the power to make known what words alone cannot articulate. As someone who is queer, genderfluid, a suicide loss survivor, and a person living with bipolar II disorder, I am especially interested in how art therapy can support individuals who have historically been marginalized or underserved within traditional mental health systems. I want to help create therapeutic spaces that feel less sterile and more human. Spaces where people can process grief, identity, trauma, and suicidality without feeling pathologized or rushed toward “fixing” themselves. I hope to use art therapy as part of a broader community-based approach to healing. My long-term dream is to help build a non-profit community mental health center that integrates traditional counseling with expressive arts, somatic healing, support groups, and accessible community care (such as support for basic needs like food insecurity, housing insecurity, and transportation access). I believe healing is often relational and creative, not solely clinical. Art therapy, to me, offers people the opportunity to reconnect with themselves, their bodies, and others in ways that can feel deeply restorative, connective, and life-giving. While I am only in my first year of clinical mental health counseling graduate study, I intend to continue with my community-based art and healing classes, with hopes to expand this into an art therapy certification. Specifically, I’d like to seek training that allows me to provide art therapy classes and groups for specific kinds of grief and loss, ranging from anticipatory grief to suicide loss to loss in identity to job or career loss and much more. Now I know that, truly, art is for everybody and every body. No matter one’s background, experience, or mental health struggle, art has the power to help us come back to presence: to our communities and ourselves.

I dream of building a sustainable community mental health center here in Central Iowa where I live. Mental health access, driven by insurance, is not fairly accessible to many people. Hence my goal is to establish a 501c(3) non-profit organization that receives funds and generates revenue through grants, philanthropic endeavors, and individual giving. This dream is ambitious, big, and most importantly, transformative for the lives it seeks to reach. Imagine a community mental health center where you can access therapy at no charge because the therapists on staff are salaried and have health insurance themselves. A licensed massage therapist is on board to help with somatic healing. Every month, a rotating chef creates gourmet meals for those experiencing housing insecurity. Therapy animals are ready to offer support and healing. Tucked away in a beautiful country naturescape, clients and visitors will be serenaded by birdsong, zippy bugs, and wind’s calm. Weekly group therapy sessions of different varieties are offered to those who benefit from group dynamics. A monthly grief support group for suicide loss survivors, led by a counselor, is on the table. Can you see the vision? Art therapy for children impacted by suicide or domestic violence. Free transportation vouchers so people can actually get to therapy. Scholarships or paid internships for future counselors from historically marginalized backgrounds. A clothing closet with gender-affirming clothes and interview attire. Restorative yoga and somatic healing classes. I can see it. I can feel it. I hope you can, too. Pursuing my master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Western Illinois University-Quad Cities is helping me build the clinical, ethical, and community-based foundation necessary to make this vision possible. My experiences navigating suicide loss, chronic mental health struggles, and inaccessible systems of care showed me how often people fall through the cracks, and unfortunately, that mental health care access is not created equal. More than anything, I want people to walk into this space and feel that they are allowed to stay alive here.

In spring 2023, I dove headfirst into my therapeutic and healing journey. In desperate need of peace after two family members died by suicide within five months of each other, alongside two others who had died by suicide years before, I needed help grappling with complex grief and trauma. Knowing that I needed something beyond traditional talk therapy, I sought out alternative healing modalities such as psychedelic-assisted therapy, somatic therapy, and equine-assisted therapy. It was the latter that fundamentally shifted my life for the better. As I often tell people, “Equine therapy put my head back on my shoulders.” Just a few months after beginning work with an American Quarter Horse named Classy, my therapist noticed that I still carried immense tension in my body. I was stiff as a board. Not only did my body feel frozen shut, but my emotions felt scattered too. One moment I was lonely and despairing, and the next I was irritable and exasperated. Ever so gently, my therapist asked whether I had ever tried yoga, which she described as “meditation in movement.” Shaking my head no, something inside me knew I needed to give it an honest try. My head might have been back on, but my body was nowhere to be found. Rather than jumping immediately into a fast-paced vinyasa class, I spent three months practicing restorative yoga nearly four times a week. It became a meditation indeed. For the first time in years, I had space to simply be. To breathe. To move my body in soft, gentle, self-loving ways. Restorative yoga and yoga nidra meditation brought me back into relationship with my body and allowed me to experience a kind of freedom I had never known before. My mind, once loud and relentless, finally quieted enough for me to hear myself clearly. One of the clearest realizations to emerge during this period was that I wanted to dedicate my life to helping others navigate grief, trauma, suicidality, and identity. Yoga opened my heart and mind enough for me to finally glimpse the person I was meant to become: a clinical mental health counselor for LGBTQIA+ individuals and people impacted by suicide loss and suicidal ideation. After a year of what I now think of as meditation in movement, I took a leap of faith and enrolled part-time in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling program at Western Illinois University–Quad Cities. While working one full-time job and two part-time jobs, I am paying for this degree entirely out of pocket. That is how deeply committed I am to this career shift. More than anyone else, I have become my own greatest source of inspiration. I have lived independently since I was sixteen years old, learning how to navigate the world with very little support. I am a suicide loss survivor, a person living with bipolar II disorder, a justice-impacted person, and a queer person of trans experience. Despite everything, I am still here, still building a meaningful life. Many people might have given up by now. Instead, I feel as though my life is only beginning. My bones know that I am meant to become a counselor, especially for those who have been historically marginalized or harmed by the mental health system. I intend to reach as many people as I can with the kind of care, understanding, and humanity that I once desperately needed myself.

One of the most meaningful and formative relationships in my life is with my mother, Leigh Anne—a relationship defined as much by absence and estrangement as by memory, intensity, and love. She died by suicide, and in many ways, I am still in relationship with her, still trying to understand her, still piecing together who she was and what she endured. My relationship with my mother was complicated long before her death. Years of estrangement created distance that left me without a clear or stable understanding of her. What I have instead are fragments: moments from childhood, sensory memories, and the echoes of stories told by others. I remember her as loud, vibrant, unpredictable—someone who could fill a space with energy, whether joy or pain. I remember her smoking, laughing, crying, moving through the world in a way that felt both alive and burdened. After her death, I was left not only with grief, but with the task of constructing meaning from what feels like an incomplete archive. Losing her to suicide fundamentally changed how I understand relationships. It forced me to confront the reality that people can hold immense pain beneath the surface, even when they are surrounded by others. It taught me that connection is fragile, and that absence—whether physical or emotional—can shape a relationship just as much as presence. It also showed me how systems, environments, and histories of trauma can impact a person’s ability to feel safe, supported, or understood. This relationship has deeply influenced how I build connections with others. I approach relationships with an acute awareness of complexity. I no longer expect people to be easily understood or neatly defined. Instead, I try to hold space for contradiction—for the ways someone can be both joyful and struggling, present and distant, known and unknowable. I have learned to listen more carefully, to pay attention to what is said and what is left unsaid. At the same time, my relationship with my mother has shaped my commitment to presence. Because I know what it feels like to lose someone without fully understanding them, I try to be more intentional in my relationships now. I value showing up, even when it is uncomfortable. I prioritize honesty, even when it is difficult. I try to create connections where people feel seen, not just in their strengths, but in their pain as well. There is also a protective instinct that has emerged from this relationship. As a child, I often felt a desire to keep my mother safe, even when I did not fully understand what she was facing. That instinct has evolved into a broader commitment to care for others in my life—to notice when someone might be struggling, to offer support without assuming I can fix what they are going through. Ultimately, my relationship with my mother has shaped me into someone who understands that connection is not about perfection or clarity. It is about presence, compassion, and a willingness to sit with uncertainty. While I may never fully understand her story, that relationship continues to guide how I show up for others—with care, attentiveness, and a deep respect for the complexity of being human.

Mental health is important to me as a student because it has been the single most defining force shaping my ability to learn, function, and remain alive. When I was told, “You have bipolar II disorder,” it did not just name a condition—it gave language to years of instability, chronic suicidality, and cycles of despair that made even basic tasks feel impossible. As a student, this means that showing up—reading, writing, participating—is not passive. It is an active, daily commitment to stability, care, and survival. Before my diagnosis, I believed that success in school required discipline alone. Now I understand that it requires support systems, self-awareness, and medical care. There were times when my mental health crisis made it difficult to think clearly, complete assignments, or even get out of bed. Healing did not arrive as clarity or ease; it arrived as breakdowns, medication trials, and the slow process of learning how to regulate my nervous system. Because of this, I approach my education differently. I prioritize sleep, nutrition, therapy, and medication not as secondary to my academic work, but as the foundation that makes it possible. My experience has also shaped how I advocate for mental health in my community. I advocate first through visibility and honesty. I speak openly about living with bipolar II disorder and chronic suicidal ideation, not to center myself, but to reduce stigma and create space for others to be honest about their own experiences. In both academic and community settings, I resist the idea that mental health struggles must be hidden or minimized to be taken seriously. I also advocate through the work I do. As a suicide loss intake specialist, I serve as a first point of contact for individuals and families in the immediate aftermath of suicide. In these moments, advocacy looks like presence—ensuring that people are met with compassion rather than silence or judgment. I help connect individuals to resources, but more importantly, I help create a space where their grief is acknowledged and validated. In my local community, I facilitate art-based spaces that integrate mental health, grief, and identity. These spaces are intentionally designed to be accessible and non-clinical, allowing people to process difficult emotions through creativity and connection. Many participants come from underrepresented or stigmatized backgrounds, including LGBTQ+ individuals and those navigating suicide loss. Advocacy, in this context, means creating environments where people feel safe to express themselves without fear of being pathologized or dismissed. Finally, I advocate for mental health through how I engage in relationships. I have learned to ask for support, set boundaries, and encourage others to do the same. I model the idea that mental health care is not a sign of weakness, but a necessary and ongoing practice. Ultimately, mental health is important to me as a student because it is inseparable from my ability to learn, grow, and contribute. My advocacy is rooted not in theory, but in lived experience—an ongoing commitment to making mental health care more visible, accessible, and humane for the communities I am part of.

“You have bipolar II disorder.” That moment did not just give me a diagnosis—it gave me a framework for understanding a life that had always felt chaotic, overwhelming, and, at times, unlivable. Sitting across from my psych nurse in a small, dark room in Iowa, I experienced something rare: recognition. Not just being told what was wrong, but being seen. My experience with mental health has shaped my goals in the most fundamental way—it has made survival itself a deliberate, daily practice, and from that practice, purpose emerged. I am pursuing a career in mental health because I know what it feels like to live inside a mind that oscillates between despair and intensity, between wanting to disappear and wanting to feel everything all at once. I have spent much of my life navigating chronic suicidality, a reality compounded by a family history marked by multiple suicides. Mental health is not theoretical to me; it is inherited, embodied, and ongoing. Receiving a bipolar II diagnosis forced me to re-evaluate what healing actually looks like. Before, I believed healing would feel peaceful, linear, even beautiful. Instead, it looked like crisis. It looked like breakdowns in horse stables, wrapped in blankets, screaming until my body gave out. It looked like failed treatments, medication trials, and the slow, uncomfortable realization that there is no singular “fix.” Healing, I learned, often feels like crawling through more of what you thought you had already survived. This understanding has deeply shaped my relationships. I no longer approach relationships with the expectation of stability or perfection, but with a commitment to presence and honesty. I have learned to communicate my needs, to ask for help without apology, and to recognize that connection does not require me to be “fixed” first. At the same time, I have become more attuned to others—to their pain, their inconsistencies, their complexity. I know what it means to feel unseen, and I carry that awareness into how I show up for others. My understanding of the world has also shifted. I no longer see mental health as an individual failure, but as something deeply intertwined with systems, environments, and histories. Trauma, violence, discrimination, and instability are not separate from mental illness—they shape it. Growing up in an environment marked by abuse, addiction, and chaos, I learned early that suffering does not exist in isolation. Later, as a queer, genderfluid person and detransitioner, I came to understand how identity and social context further complicate mental health. The world is not neutral; it impacts who is allowed to feel safe, seen, and supported. Living with bipolar II has also challenged the narratives I once believed about myself. I am not unstable, dramatic, or unreliable—I am navigating a complex condition that requires care, discipline, and awareness. My life is not defined by disorder, but shaped by how I learn to live with it. Medication, therapy, rest, and community are not signs of weakness; they are tools that allow me to participate in life. Ultimately, my experience with mental health has taught me that life exists in dualities. There is despair and there is joy, often coexisting. There is chaos and there is structure. There is suffering and there is meaning. I have learned that I may never know a life without suicidal thoughts, but I can learn how to live alongside them without letting them define my future. This is what shapes my goals, my relationships, and my understanding of the world: the commitment to keep choosing life, even when it is difficult, and to help create a world where others can do the same.

Being a suicide loss survivor is not a single moment of grief—it is an ongoing relationship with absence, memory, and the impossible task of piecing together a life that can no longer speak for itself. My mother, Leigh Anne, died by suicide in 2021, and in the years since, I have struggled not only with her death, but with the deeper challenge of understanding who she was, and what it means to carry her with me. Fifteen years of estrangement had already complicated our relationship before her death. When she died, I was left not with a clear narrative, but with fragments—words others used to define her, images from childhood, and the stark, clinical facts pulled from an obituary and a detective’s report. I learned that her car arrived at an elementary school parking lot at 9:25 p.m., that her brake lights glowed red at 9:52 p.m., and that she was found just before dawn. These details, precise and cold, became part of my grief. They did not bring me closer to her; they only deepened the sense that I was trying to assemble a story that would never be complete. One of the greatest challenges has been learning to live without answers. Suicide invites the question “why,” but rarely offers a satisfying response. Even the note she left behind—brief, misspelled, and haunting—created more confusion than clarity. I have had to learn that healing does not come from solving the mystery of her death, but from accepting that some parts of her life and pain will remain unknowable. Another challenge has been confronting the physical reality of her death. Seeing her body—deflated, unfamiliar, yet undeniably hers—was an experience that reshaped my understanding of both life and loss. I remember touching her face, kissing her nose, noticing the remnants of mascara left unwashed. I remember trying, in small and desperate ways, to bridge the gap between the living person I once knew and the still body in front of me. That moment forced me to confront not only her absence, but the fragility of the body itself—the way a life can disappear, leaving only form behind. And yet, within this devastation, there have been lessons. I have come to understand that suicide is not a moral failure, but a human response to overwhelming pain—often shaped by systems that fail to protect and support. My mother’s life was marked by domestic abuse, instability, and untreated mental illness. Her death, while tragic, did not emerge in isolation. It was the culmination of a lifetime of suffering that was never fully addressed. Resilience, for me, has not meant moving on or finding closure. It has meant learning how to carry her story differently. It shows up in my ability to hold both the painful truths of her life and the moments of beauty I still remember—her loud, infectious laugh, her love of music, the image of her in the 90s, smoking by the pool, alive and unapologetically herself. It means allowing myself to feel grief and, at times, even humor—laughing through tears at the way she misspelled “cremate,” not out of disrespect, but out of a deep, complicated love. Hope has emerged in quieter ways. It exists in my commitment to remembering her not as a single moment of tragedy, but as a full, complex person. It exists in my effort to make meaning from what cannot be undone. And it exists in my belief that by telling her story—and my own—I can honor the depth of her pain while refusing to let it be the only thing that defines her.

My life has been shaped at the intersections of mental health, suicide loss, and LGBTQIA+ experience in ways that are both deeply personal and profoundly influential in the path I have chosen. I come from a family where suicide is not an abstract concept, but a devastating and recurring reality. I have lost four family members to suicide, experiences that have fundamentally altered how I understand grief, connection, and the fragility of support systems. These losses were not just moments in time—they became part of how I move through the world, how I relate to others, and how I recognize both the urgency and complexity of mental health care. At the same time, I have navigated my own mental health challenges, including persistent suicidal ideation. Living with this has required me to develop a deep awareness of my internal landscape and to actively practice self-advocacy. I have had to learn how to ask for help, set boundaries, and seek care even when systems feel inaccessible or stigmatizing. These experiences have given me not only resilience, but also a grounded understanding of what it means to survive within imperfect systems. My identity as a queer, genderfluid person has further shaped these experiences. I have witnessed and felt how discrimination, invisibility, and lack of affirming care can intensify mental health struggles. For many LGBTQIA+ individuals, mental health challenges are not isolated—they are compounded by social and political environments that can be unsafe or invalidating. This reality has made it clear to me that mental health care must be both clinically informed and culturally responsive. Together, these experiences have transformed how I understand suicide. I do not view it through a moral lens, but as a human response to overwhelming pain—often occurring when individuals feel unseen, unsupported, or without viable options. This perspective has deepened my commitment to creating spaces where people can be met with compassion, nuance, and dignity. These experiences have not only impacted me personally, but have also guided my professional path. I am currently pursuing a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and working directly with individuals affected by suicide loss. Through this work, I strive to offer the kind of presence and support that I know can make a difference: listening without judgment, validating complex emotions, and honoring each person’s story. Ultimately, being impacted by mental health challenges, suicide loss, and LGBTQIA+ identity has shaped both who I am and how I show up in the world. It has instilled in me a commitment to advocacy, to compassionate care, and to building systems that better support those who are too often overlooked.

My decision to pursue a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Western Illinois University did not begin in a classroom—or because I majored in psychology (I majored in gender studies over ten years ago). It began within the thrashing waves of suicide loss and suicide bereavement, all while grappling with my own chronic, pervasive suicidality. My family, both paternally and maternally, carries a painful legacy: suicide by firearm. As a result, I have spent my entire life—now thirty-five years—navigating persistent suicidal ideation. I am also a queer person of trans experience, and I have felt firsthand how anti-queer and anti-trans discrimination can intensify that pain. These realities are not abstract to me; they are lived, ongoing, and deeply formative. Four of my family members have died by suicide. Experiencing this level of loss has fundamentally altered how I understand grief, connection, and responsibility to community. It has reshaped how I view the world. I no longer see suicide through a lens of morality—of right versus wrong, selfishness versus courage. Instead, I understand it as a human response to overwhelming pain, often compounded by systems that fail the most vulnerable among us. The field of clinical mental health counseling needs more practitioners who understand these nuances. I am not entering this field out of abstract interest, nor simply because I want to make the world more livable. I am entering it from a sustained commitment to work I am already doing. As a suicide loss intake specialist with Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE), I serve as the first point of contact following a suicide death, helping coordinate compassionate, timely responses between law enforcement, dispatch, and LOSS Team volunteers. In these moments, I witness both profound grief and the critical importance of immediate, human-centered care. In addition, I am a teaching artist at a local art center in Des Moines, Iowa, where I facilitate art-based spaces that integrate grief, loss, and mental health. I work with widows, LGBTQ+ community members, suicide loss survivors, and individuals navigating substance use and recovery. These spaces allow people to process complex emotions through creativity, connection, and shared experience. Self-advocacy is central to my life and work. It means acknowledging my own mental health needs, setting boundaries, seeking support, and refusing to internalize stigma. It also shapes my approach to suicide awareness and prevention, which I understand not as a set of interventions, but as relational, ongoing work grounded in empathy, presence, and cultural humility. I am particularly committed to serving underrepresented communities, including LGBTQ+ individuals, first-generation students, and those navigating grief in stigmatized or under-resourced environments. As a genderfluid, first-generation graduate student, I understand how identity and access intersect within mental health care. My goal is to contribute to community-based mental health spaces that are affirming, accessible, and rooted in lived experience. Ultimately, my work is guided by a simple but urgent belief: people deserve care that sees the full context of their lives.