I spent my most formative years watching my mom play the role of a mother and a father. When my father lost custody of my three younger sisters and me due to a history of neglect, alcoholism, substance abuse, and a gambling addiction, my mom never whined or complained about having to do extra work. She immediately faced the challenge head-on, taking on extra shifts as a nurse at Highland Hospital in Oakland, California, the hospital with the most trafficked emergency department in the country, and coming home and continuing to take care of my grandfather, as well as my two siblings and me who have chronic illnesses. Whenever I would ask her what kept her driven, she would tell me about my grandfather; an immigrant from Ethiopia, a single father, and the most dedicated family person she knew. She told me about how he would never let her fall behind despite the traumatic things she experienced, and how she wanted to be that parent for my sisters and me. Watching her fight through her struggles, no matter the gravity of the situation she is facing has shaped me as a person by teaching me the vital values of perseverance, hard work, and family. To take as many financial burdens as I could off of my mom's list of responsibilities, I started finding paid opportunities and working as soon as I entered my freshman year of high school. I used every check to fill in the gaps that my mom couldn't reach for my sisters because I understood the trauma my sisters faced living in a low-income household with one parent. I wanted to help my mom make sure they have a childhood they can look back on with positive memories. I also had to fill these gaps in for myself. For the entirety of my teenagehood, out of respect for my mother and the work she puts in for me, I made asking my mom or direct family for money a last- and worst-case scenario. Being raised by hard workers like my mother and my grandfather, and growing up in Oakland, I witnessed hustle directly in so many ways, and I used my independence to find my own ways to make ends meet. I founded my own secondhand clothing business, performed poetry at festivals and community events for money, and participated in nine paid internships throughout high school. None of the work I did was intended to make my college application look good; however, the experience I gained got me accepted to Spelman College, an illustrious HBCU with an acceptance rate of 19% for the incoming freshman class. Many of my friends and peers told me that they wouldn't have been able to persevere through the struggles I faced, and I always told them that my determination came from my mother. Living with a maternal role model like her made it impossible for me to fail, because just watching her fight her hardest to give her children the life she believed they deserved instilled me with every core value I needed, and all the motivation necessary for me to achieve my goals and dreams. I am dedicated to making the hard work she put herself through worth it, and to making the American Dream my grandpa came to this country for come true.

Success to me means breaking generational curses and taking advantage of the American Dream that I wasn't meant to have access to. I'm from an immigrant Habesha household that reinforced, for all the grandchildren in my family, the idea that we needed to attend an Ivy League and become a lawyer or doctor. After a quick Google search ("jobs that make the most money"), I was committed to becoming an anesthesiologist from sixth grade to my sophomore year of high school. In my sophomore year, I joined the Social Justice Academy at my school, a three-year cohort program based in ethnic studies and social justice. I learned concepts that challenged what we'd been taught in K-12 education like ikigai, the idea of finding intersections between what you're passionate about, good at, and what can make you money. I also learned about community cultural wealth, and how a symptom of capitalism is manipulating people into believing that the wisdom they learn from their communities is inferior to money. The lessons spoke to me; they were different from anything I had heard at home or in my career readiness class at school. For a while, I was angry with the adults in my life for what I felt was trapping me into a life I didn't want. It wasn't until the next year, in my U.S. Hxstory course, that I realized my anger needed to be redirected. I learned about the African Diaspora, and how many Black people were genocided and colonized because of Western imperialism. I realized that a part of that colonization that had successfully influenced the way my family thought was mental, and that they were taught that money is synonymous with success. Ethnic studies taught me that my life is worth more than capitalistic standards of success. I've been able to build my goals around my values and passions; I plan to major in English at Clark Atlanta University, and to become a high school teacher at a school that predominantly serves students of color. I want to do this because teaching is my ikigai; I love writing, education, and giving back to my community. I want to be a part of an education movement that teaches students of color that they are more than what this country wants to use them for, or a predetermined life plan built on colonized mindsets. This scholarship will help me achieve my goal by funding my journey to Atlanta. I am not getting financial help from my family; they look down on the idea of me going to an HBCU because they've been taught that an institution is useless if it's not prestigious in the eyes of future employers, who they automatically assume to be white. They also look down on me for majoring in English because they've never seen someone with an art or teaching career have the amount of affluence they deem acceptable. I understand where they're coming from because I know what they had to go through to assimilate in this country, and to them, what I plan to do uproots everything they've worked for, but I don't plan on changing any of my goals. This scholarship will be a stepping stone towards creating an amazing life for myself by serving my communities and staying true to my values regardless of money, and showing my younger siblings and cousins that they can do the same for themselves, because that is the most radical thing you can do for your people in a country that has taught you that you are not allowed to dream.

My experience with diabetes has shaped who I am today because it has forced me to come to terms with my own anger, and it has shown me that self-love is the only thing that can truly heal me. I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of 15. My diagnosis came at a time when I was incredibly depressed; my family and I were going through a custody battle with my father because of his alcoholism, drug abuse, gambling addiction, and neglect of my three younger sisters and me. The toll of not having a present father after being a "daddy's girl" my whole life sent me spiraling, and I used sugary drinks as an outlet for the things I was going through. I thought that because I was still underweight, it was okay for me to drink more than two sodas a day. I had no idea that I was underweight, or that I craved drinks so often, because I was going through underlying diabetes ketoacidosis. By the time I made it to the emergency room, my blood sugar was at 700 mg/dL. Even after my health was getting back under control, I was still angry. A diagnosis didn't change anything for me but physical symptoms. If anything, it made things worse and put more things for me to stress about on my seemingly never-ending list. I almost immediately got alarm fatigue; I would shut my Dexcom app off as soon as I saw my blood sugar rising past 180 mg/dL, and I wouldn't turn it back on until I had the energy to re-face my reality of having diabetes. Luckily for me, I had (and have) a support system that refused to give up on me. My mother, who is a registered nurse, did her best to explain my diabetes to me in ways that could help me understand that my diagnosis wasn't some kind of sentence or punishment. My endocrinologist, who's seen me break down in tears multiple times in her office from frustration, never treated me any differently because of my mistakes, and continued to give me the best treatment I could've ever asked for. Even my friends would change their whole meal plans for the day to include me as I was getting the hang of my new diet. The kindness I received from the people around me made me realize that I was not only hurting my friends and family emotionally, but also that I was the only one who would feel the physical short- and long-term effects of what I was doing to myself. Type 1 diabetes has already impacted my future because it has taught me that having a future is a privilege, and it continues to teach me that the more love you pour into yourself, the more motivation you have to pour it into the people and things you love. Becoming healthier has given me the energy and motivation to step out of my comfort zone and to live my life to its fullest potential. It's now been exactly two years since I was diagnosed with diabetes, and I have won regional and national poetry competitions. It took me an incredibly long time to see my diagnosis as the wake-up call I now understand it was for me. The journey I took to get to the place I am today, mentally and physically, was necessary, and I would never do it any other way.

I hope that my future students will gain a critical consciousness that they will forever be able to use outside the classroom. Throughout the past three years, I’ve been a part of my school’s Social Justice Academy (SJA). SJA is a cohort-based ethnic studies and social justice-based program for aspiring student activists who want to learn more about history from the perspectives of people of color. My time in SJA has changed my life; I’ve learned more about my culture from my ancestors’ lens rather than from the viewpoint of the people who colonized them, spearheaded two political campaigns, earned the California State Seal of Civic Engagement, and have become actively involved with a multitude of organizations outside of school. I’ve also gained a tight-knit group of friends I consider family in my cohort. Due to my time in SJA, I have gained a critical consciousness, or the ability to reflect on the political environment of my community and the world in general. This ability has become a core value and trait of mine, and it shines through in everything that I do. From my writing to the things I talk about, my homework assignments to my extracurricular activities, it is safe to say that activism is one of the most important aspects of my life. I often wonder about how different my life would be if I had been introduced to this line of thinking earlier. As a young Black girl, I believe that having a role model tell me that the way the world has taught me to look at myself and my people isn’t right would have saved me a lot of self-esteem issues, identity crises, and tears. Now, my mission is to combine two of my greatest passions, social justice and teaching, and be that role model for my future students. Ethnic studies being taught in elementary school classes is often looked down upon, as people often believe that children are “too young” to understand the concepts. However, what people may fail to realize is that ethnic studies in the younger grades doesn’t have to mean having children holding picket signs in the streets; it could be as simple as teaching them to treat everyone with the same amount of respect, or teaching them true history using terms and concepts they can understand rather than introducing them to myths that have been fed to us since the beginning of our educations. My students will know empathy and courage like the back of their hands, and with the introduction to critical consciousness that I will give them, they will always know that their voices matter.

My life shifted the first time someone called me a poet. My class was celebrating the Hassani Bell Day of Remembrance during my sophomore year. Hassani was an activist; he was one of the students at San Francisco State University who went on a hunger strike to protect ethnic studies. He also attended the Social Justice Academy at my school, a cohort-based ethnic studies program I had just joined. He was also an incredible poet. A few seniors came into our academy’s history class to share his story and encourage us to write our own poem about why social justice mattered to us. I had always been a writer. I had been filling journals with short stories and diary entries since elementary school, and my favorite moments of high school were writing essays on topics I cared about. But I had never been given the chance to write creatively. When I got this opportunity, I filled the whole page with poetry. I could feel emotions flowing from my brain to my hand, and the smile on my face grew with every word I wrote. It felt like I finally had a home for all the butterflies in my stomach in a form of writing I never thought I was capable of creating. Looking back, the poem wasn’t that good. Still, when my stoic yet comforting history teacher walked by my desk and saw my page filled with lines about how I was taught to be toxically patriotic growing up, and how social justice helped me find my culture and my personality, he looked at me and said, “Wow. You’re a poet.” I was stunned. The title of “poet” sounded so magical. To me, poets were the cool girls with berets who had the whole room snapping with every line. That one sentence spoke life into a brand-new passion of mine and opened up a world I never thought was possible. I had never considered myself artistic. I could appreciate art, but drawing and painting were never my strengths. I always felt like I had no outlet or value outside of my grades. When I separated from my dad and was diagnosed with diabetes during my first semester of sophomore year, my grades began to drop, and I felt useless. But being told I was good at something that didn’t need to be graded shifted my whole perspective on myself. I can now proudly call myself a poet. I am my city’s vice youth poet laureate, and I have competed in and won regional and national poetry slams. My favorite performance moment was breaking the “nine barrier,” which means being the first person in the slam to have their lowest score above a nine. I did it with a poem about the Bay Area’s transportation system. A kid in the audience came up to me afterward and said, “I never thought a poem about a bus could be interesting, but you did it.” That moment became the biggest highlight of my poetry career. My mission in performing poetry is not to gain money or fame but to encourage other youth to explore art they might love, because it could become a passion. I also make it a point to brighten up every room I walk into. I dare to speak to strangers, and it is one of my favorite things to do. To this day, I still keep my teacher updated about my performances and the drama unfolding in the poetry scene. He was the first one to tell me I was a poet, and today, I believe it.

I was fifteen and a half, watching Amélie, when I first understood that being a stereotype would never make me happy. It inspired me and showed me why representation matters, even though it didn’t have any. As a young Black girl in America, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. If you don’t fit the “loud and angry” caricature, people will twist you until you do. If you do fit it, you’re labeled “unprofessional” or “ghetto.” I’ve always considered myself a weird girl, and I’ve always been proud of being Black, but for the longest time, I didn’t think I was allowed to be both. I had to master code-switching. At the lunch table, I exaggerated my Bay Area accent. In class, I tried on a “professional” voice, which I later realized was just an unconscious mimicry of a white woman. At home, I was too tired to speak at all. By sophomore year, I didn’t know which version of me was real. Movies became my escape. I gravitated toward stories about odd, awkward girls, like Frances Ha and Lady Bird, because they reminded me of myself. But no movie ever held up a mirror to my soul the way Amélie did. I discovered it while scrolling through a Letterboxd list called “A Woman’s Journey into Film.” As a student planning on starting my second year in video production, I thought it would be the perfect guide into cinema. Amélie was the first film on the list, and it changed me. The cinematography alone could inspire anyone for years; the vibrant reds and greens were the perfect complementary color scheme I still try to replicate when I color-grade my own projects. But the story was what moved me most: a socially anxious French girl who loves helping others, slowly building the courage to begin her own love story. Amélie reminded me how to believe in adventures, and how to find happiness in little things. It made me a little nosier, a lot more obsessed with the color red, and infinitely more positive. I recommend it to all my friends, but my Black friends usually raise an eyebrow at me. “Why would I want to watch some French movie about a random white girl? We already have enough English ones with the same storyline,” someone once said. That response haunted me. It pushed me to search for films about quirky girls of color, and I found none. Even Amélie itself had no Black characters! Suddenly, every movie I’d ever seen about a Black girl looked different. Why couldn’t we be whimsical, too? How many Black and Brown girls were hiding parts of themselves, never seeing proof in film that their uniqueness could be celebrated? That question became my mission. In my senior year of video production, I set out to make as many short films as I could about weird girls of color because if I hadn’t seen Amélie, I might still be lost in stereotypes. In the end, Amélie introduced me to myself. Now, I want my films to do the same for the girls who have never seen themselves on screen.