Interior Design isn't what someone usually thinks of when thinking of an artistic career path but my goal in life is to change that. Interior design is more than choosing a paint color or cute pillow to match. It is making a space evoke feelings and emotion as soon as you walk into a room, building, or area. Through both architecture and decor, we change people's lives for the better and continue to improve the spaces we frequent. I want to open and operate my own residential interior design firm by the time I'm 35 and ensure that the places we spend the most time in, our houses, feel more like homes. A home doesn't have to be the biggest one on the block or have the newest finishes, but it should make its residents feel like they can truly relax or that the neighbors can gather and become chosen family. That is what the art of interior design is about: evoking feelings to bring people together.

Perfectionism. People envy the drive and quality of work that is produced that comes out of people who experience perfectionism. Unfortunately, being a perfectionist comes with many downsides that are hidden behind the curtain of being the best you can be. For me, the worst is being afraid to start new things if I don’t 100% know that I will do it perfectly. However, music is something that comes with mistakes, learning, and not being perfect. When I joined the band in sixth grade, I didn’t know quite how much that would be challenged. The very first time we ever got chair placements, I was first chair out of 42 other clarinets. It really boosted my love for music but as I continued further into band, I started to figure out that I was going to have to put in the work to truly be as good as I wanted to be. By the end of 8th grade, I struggled to continue trying. I was at the bottom of my section with a director that didn’t really care about my section so I was just losing my love for band. I stuck it out because while I may be a perfectionist, I am also one stubborn person. By my sophomore year of high school, I figured out that my love for band came from being around the people I love doing what we love. My perfectionism may have been tested when I couldn’t uphold my standards by I found a new way to justify my love for band: persistence and passion.

Creativity is required for me. I’m an art major so it’s hard to find joy in being creative when it’s being graded for being perfect. Creativity is not supposed to be judged to that level so I have to find ways to be creative outside of my courses. Sometimes that is easier said than done. Some days my school work sucks all the creative juices out of me while others just energize me to create more for my true enjoyment. That manifests in several ways for me, the biggest being music. I have always loved music and it only grew after joining band in sixth grade. For the first time in eight and a half years, I’m not playing in an ensemble consistently so I have to make sure I make it a point to do what I truly love. Whether sitting down and playing clarinet for 30 minutes or belting in the shower, sometimes that is all I need to feel creative. Placing paint on a canvas or writing in my journal also helps me put some creativity into my life. It doesn’t have to be a new orchestra or an amazing self-portrait. The simplest things can effectively apply creativity in one’s life.

This piece is entitled The Story Behind. As someone who is very emotionally motivated, I love learning about why people are the way they are. Every day, we pass people who we know nothing about and probably will never see again but they have their own lives and their own stories just as you yourself do. The people we pass may be insignificant to us but they have places where they have grown and their own history. When starting my thought process, I wanted to explore my own history and what has made me into who I am today. As the epitome of a band kid, the programs I have been in have played such a large part in who I am. I presented the duality between both my high school and college programs within one uniform. While I spent a lot of time physically in my uniforms, the groups have played such a huge role in shaping who I am. I have kind of touched all forms of art specialties in my life but the ones that stuck with me the most are the ones I get to influence others whether a beautiful piece of music or turning a house into a home through interior design. My dreams for the future include opening and running my own interior design firm. I want to create spaces that people can thrive in and really change their life. A new kitchen can help an aspiring chef make their recipes 5-star quality. A hospital can make a young child struggling with a disease feel a little less wary about being there all the time. The right combination of design elements can drastically alter how a space affects people and I want to be there to help that.

Art is the language that anyone can understand. No matter who you are, you can interpret a piece of art and it is right because that is your perception of the work. Just knowing that inspires me to create art. I get to make people think and it does not matter if we speak the same traditional language because the capabilities of the visual arts are immersive. My specialty of art is not as traditional as say painting or drawing but rather immersing people in the work itself. As an interior designer, I create spaces for people to feel something in. You don’t just stare at some marks on a stretched canvas but rather those marks become a plush piece of velvety furniture or a cabinet that makes you rethink what's possible in design. By earning this scholarship, I would be helping relieve some financial stress with my mother, a hardworking single mom. We lost my dad when I was eight but he is actually one of the reasons I am pursuing interior design. Pretty much every Saturday morning since I could walk, my dad and I would be walking around Home Depot or Lowes, looking for the next home project to work on together. While looking at screws was fun, my personal favorite was grabbing a hot dog from an old man with a full white beard and then going to look at lighting and rugs. My little 7-year-old self would see a lamp and the ideas rapidly appeared in my head of what the room surrounding it would like. My dad and I going to home improvement stores was our special thing. My sister did not join us and neither did my mom; just my dad and his little girl. Now, he probably didn’t take me every Saturday thinking that it would be my future career but little did he know I credit him for my love of this kind of art. Just a simple light inspired my thoughts and I want to carry on that inspiration to the spaces I design for people. Interior design is more than just making something look pretty. It is making a house feel like a home and a hospital welcoming rather than scary. The passion and creativity it requires to design is not something anyone has or can just learn. Art is an internal feeling that comes with experiencing life and making something to embody that feeling. Interior design is making a space to embody you and leads to experiencing life.

In the early days of the Covid lockdown, I found myself spending quite a lot of time outside doing my school work with my best friend right next to me. Angel is reaching 14 years young this April and while she has her senior dog moments, her heart is still full of puppy love and keeps me going through this unpredictable time of life.

“We are what we believe we are” -C.S. Lewis Life is too short to be pretending we are something we’re not. I read this quote for 180 days in my eleventh-grade literature class. Written in curvy blue lettering as a poster on the wall, it stared at me and I stared right back trying to decipher what it meant to me. My first thought was the classic “fake it till you make it” which is what I believe most people think of as well. You can tell yourself that you are whatever you want to be but why? Why not believe in your true self and grow that person into their fullest potential? When going through formative years, such as junior year in high school, it’s important to instill values so that later in your life you’re not having to unlearn behaviors that could be harmful. As I stared at the poster, I began to develop goals and dreams for where I wanted to see myself in the future. I redirected this idea of being who you want to be perceived as into something I will be. This quote helped me figure out what I a studying in college, what I value in life, and frankly, made me reevaluate how I view life. I go through each day in life trying to make myself a better person and making sure I am not faking my true personality around people. In my junior year in high school, I grew into a lot of the personality traits that I still possess today, simply because I embraced much of who I am. I am unapologetically myself and love myself because of those blue curvy letters with words from C.S. Lewis.

My Mom, just like many of our moms, is /the/ person I look up to. Growing up, my mom was the working parent while my dad was the stay-at-home dad. He was in the airforce so he only went to the base for a few days at the end of the month while the rest of the time, he was home taking care of me and my older sister. From an early age, my life differed from many of my friends where their moms stayed home and the dad went out to work. My perception of the “breadwinner dad” idea was already skewed and even more so when my dad passed away when I was eight. My mom became a single mom and my older sister, only sixteen, turned into a secondary parent. It was not until later in my life when I began to understand how hard it was for my mom during the first couple of years after losing my dad. Like many, the relationship with our parent(s) ebb and flow but the one between my mom and I only got stronger. While we have our differences, there are so many more similarities. She taught me how to love someone with my entire heart, how to be the hardest worker, and most importantly, to value each and every single day. As we both get older, she likes to draw a comparison between the both of us. As a very type-A person, I’m always planning my future and as I like to say, “worrying about it now so that I don’t have to worry about it later.” She often sits me down and just tells me to slow down. My mom was like me at my age: never took in each day and flew past the times she wished she could’ve enjoyed. I have slowed down a little and it has allowed me to appreciate what I couldn’t before. I see people smiling around friends, the smells around me, and finally, the people who are in my support system all around me. Though I am still struggling to slow down and appreciate the day, I enjoy planning my future inspired by some sizable goals. That’s one thing my mom instilled in me from a young age that I have no problem showing: ambition. One of my biggest pet peeves in life is just floating through life with no passion. My mom was always doing something to make her life better and it always had to do with her happiness. Influenced by her, all of my life goals are to improve my own happiness and act on my passions. One of the last things I want to do in life is be stuck living in the suburbs, with a husband and two kids, working a nine-to-five desk job. While that sounds like an amazing life for some, I want my life to consist of travel, meeting new people, and inspiring others. My dream job is to own my personal interior design firm and use my passion for expression through art to create spaces for people to thrive. I want to show people how to love for others through the areas and environment that I create. From hosting dinners to celebrating accomplishments, a space creates new and stronger relationships. I want to do for other people what my mom created for me: a place to thrive and grow. I credit my mom for pushing me to be who I am and want to be. She has created me. Winning this scholarship would help relieve a little bit of stress that my mom puts on herself to get me through school. She has always said that she’ll retire after I graduate undergrad but I don’t want to be the reason she keeps pushing herself to work. Recently she has had a lot of work stress and the more that she works, the less time I get to enjoy her time and after losing my dad so early, I want to enjoy all the time I possibly can with my mom. After learning how to slow down with my mom, I want to give back to her everything she has done for me.

My role model is not a celebrity or athlete but someone a little closer to home… literally living inside of it. My Mom, just like many of our moms, is /the/ person I look up to. Growing up, my mom was the working parent while my dad was the stay-at-home dad. He was in the airforce so he only went to the base for a few days at the end of the month while the rest of the time, he was home taking care of me and my older sister. From an early age, my life differed from many of my friends where their moms stayed home and the dad went out to work. My perception of the “breadwinner dad” idea was already skewed and even more so when my dad passed away when I was eight. My mom became a single mom and my older sister, only sixteen, turned into a secondary parent. It was not until later in my life when I began to understand how hard it was for my mom during the first couple of years after losing my dad. Like many, the relationship with our parent(s) ebb and flow but the one between my mom and I only got stronger. While we have our differences, there are so many more similarities. She taught me how to love someone with my entire heart, how to be the hardest worker, and most importantly, to value each and every single day. As we both get older, she likes to draw a comparison between the both of us. As a very type-A person, I’m always planning my future and as I like to say, “worrying about it now so that I don’t have to worry about it later.” She often sits me down and just tells me to slow down. My mom was like me at my age: never took in each day and flew past the times she wished she could’ve enjoyed. I have slowed down a little and it has allowed me to appreciate what I couldn’t before. I see people smiling around friends, the smells around me, and finally, the people who are in my support system all around me. Though I am still struggling to slow down and appreciate the day, I enjoy planning my future inspired by some sizable goals. That’s one thing my mom instilled in me from a young age that I have no problem showing: ambition. One of my biggest pet peeves in life is just floating through life with no passion. My mom was always doing something to make her life better and it always had to do with her happiness. Influenced by her, all of my life goals are to improve my own happiness and act on my passions. One of the last things I want to do in life is be stuck living in the suburbs, with a husband and two kids, working a nine-to-five desk job. While that sounds like an amazing life for some, I want my life to consist of travel, meeting new people, and inspiring others. My dream job is to own my personal interior design firm and use my passion for expression through art to create spaces for people to thrive. I want to show people how to love for others through the areas and environment that I create. From hosting dinners to celebrating accomplishments, a space creates new and stronger relationships. I want to do for other people what my mom created for me: a place to thrive and grow. I credit my mom for pushing me to be who I am and want to be. If it were not for here, I would not be the person I am.

Growing up, I was always told that the gays were going to hell. When my family would be watching House Hunters, my mom would switch the channel if a gay couple was on it. I didn’t know until I was 14 that one of my uncles was gay so whenever I felt anything that was not “straight” I felt so guilty and ashamed until my junior year when I began to meet members of the LGBTQ+ community that had no fear of what others thought of them and were truly happy no matter what people thought of them. Now me being me, that is all I cared about up until almost a year ago. It was coming up on almost a year of me being out to my family but also a year since I had been sexually assaulted. My confidence was about the same levels as 7th grade, pimple-ridden, braces faced me, and not because I didn’t like myself but because I was being told that I shouldn’t. My family still called my sexuality a sin and a burden and my story about my trauma was still a joke to some friends. I was stuck alone in quarantine and had time to think… I didn’t want to feel this way anymore. A few months prior, I had finally stopped blaming myself for both situations. I began to share my story and my beliefs and slowly, I started to take my power back from the people invalidating my story and feelings. The friends who took my story as a joke, are no longer in my life and my family who called me a sin, well I still love them dearly so we are working on that part of my life together. Sometimes we have progressed but then somedays I find out that my mother would not attend my wedding if I were to get married. My therapist has helped me so much in my journey in self-love and mental health and I am so thankful for her. She truly has made such an impact on my life. With the improvement of my self-love journey, I have accepted my perfectionist, overplanning, open-book self. I am unapologetically myself and some people find that threatening. I still find myself going back to my old ways sometimes. I had a roommate that found out she could take advantage of my kindness and when I finally stood up for myself, she took offense and began to attack the things she knew I struggled the most with. If I were have had this happen even a year ago, I would not have been able to recover as I did simply because now, I love myself unapologetically.

I am going to be honest, I can’t sit here and write about how I’ve always had an amazing relationship with the Lord. When I was eight years old, my dad joined my grandmother in heaven. I remember laying in bed staring at my ceiling thinking “why me” and “how could you do this?” When I was in middle school, I never fit in with my youth group at church. I was looked down on by the “cool kids” and the other half of them had attitudes of “I’m holy-er than thou because I know the bible better than you” and I was not good enough for them. I felt like I had nowhere to feel like I belonged in the church and questioned why my life was so negative… until God sent my best friend into my life. It’s actually a funny story of how I ended up becoming best friends with her. Her twin sister was in my first-grade class and we were in each other classes for 3 more years but in middle school, when she was classified as gifted, we had to make an extra effort to see each other which meant hanging out with her outside of school and subsequently, her twin sister. They attended a church down the road and began inviting me to the “fun” events and slowly, I began going to their weekly youth group more and more and I finally was happy in a church. Freshman year is hard for everyone but I was torn between making my mom happy and making myself happy by actually enjoying my time at church. I was being pushed and pulled between loving and hating church and in turn, my relationship with God. By my junior year in high school, I had my license and had the chance to choose whether I wanted to try and repair my relationship with God or just let it dwindle but I had one realization that made me make a decision. Growing up, I was always told that the gays were going to Hell. When my family would be watching House Hunters, my mom would switch the channel if a gay couple was on it. I didn’t know until I was 14 that one of my uncles was gay so whenever I felt anything that was not “straight” I felt so guilty and ashamed until my junior year when I began to meet members of the LGBTQ+ community that had amazing relationships with God. I began to realize that my relationship with Him was not defined by what a church, family members, or anyone else thought it should be but by what I defined it as. I knew within a couple days of realizing this that I was meant to have an amazing and everlasting relationship with God and that no one could stop me from pursuing this. When I came out to my mom 8 months after accepting who I was, I was told that my “decision” was a burden and sinful. Two years later and we still have arguments over the topic but I know the Lord is working through both of us to learn and grow. When reflecting on my life so far, I have come to realize that God truly does have a plan for me even when I don’t remember that he does. With everything that I have been through, I have been able to be there for so many people from the loss of loved ones to coming to terms with who they truly are and I am so thankful that I was lead to the decision to trust in Him with all my heart. I have met so many amazing people through our love of Christ and would not change a thing because everything in my life has made me… me.

As a young activist, I am continually trying to educate people and create a safe place to learn. I hope that by my efforts, young voters learn how to differentiate between facts and opinion, look for their own stances, and then use their own knowledge to promote a passion for politics among others. From the beginning of my voting career, I wanted to be informed as to what I was voting for. The 2020 General Election was my first election as well as most of older Gen-Z’s and thankfully, I am not alone in wanting to get my generation to get out and vote. This election was highly contested and needed the support of my generation and I was going to help that. Soon, my drive to educate myself turned into my friends coming to me for where to start when wanting to do the same and finding out that I loved getting to teach people about the whole process of voting from registration to absentee ballots and in-person voting. I was constantly asking my friends if they have registered, requested their absentee ballot since we were at school, and making sure they sent their ballots in time to be counted. Election day came, turned into Election Days, and suddenly Wolf Blitzer, Chris Cuomo, and Don Lemon did not leave my T.V. screen for five days straight. Though the presidential election was over (for most people), in my home state of Georgia, it was just the beginning of an equally important race. The Perdue/Ossoff run-off and the Loeffler/Warnock special election were to decide the balance of the United States Senate and this power was in the hands of Georgia voters. My winter break consisted of phone banking, postering, and continuing the education of new and even old voters in the hopes that Jon and Raphael would pull through to secure these spots. Getting yelled at while phone banking is not fun but is for sure worth it when you get to a voter who did not even know there was an election again. I attended events in the rain, freezing temperatures, and the occasional sunny day but once again was worth it because I got to spread the word about an important event happening that affects all of our futures. Today’s society is a fine balance for white activists. We have to acknowledge the privilege we have and use that to our advantage to help the voices of the suppressed but do not want to overstep and rather speak for those voices. After the emergence of Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, social media began to see a rise of so-called “fake activists” or “slacktivism” who just posted a black square, a cute infographic, or simply nothing. I try not to be those people by conscientiously educating myself on P.O.C. history, listening to those voices, and learning about their current day experiences with the oppression and tyranny of today’s world. “You must let the suffering speak if you want to hear the truth” -Cornel West

In the early days of the coronavirus lockdown, I found myself spending quite a lot of time outside doing my school work with my best friend right next to me. Angel is reaching 13 years young this April and while she has her senior dog moments, her heart is still full of puppy love and keeps me going through this weird time of life. My Instagram: @just_sarah_hall