“Shaine, have you heard of art therapy?” My drawing instructor, Una Kim, asked me this one quiet day in the studio as I worked on a sketch. I had never heard of art therapy. As she explained the field and told me that mental health needed more people of color, my hand paused. Her question gave a name to something I had already experienced long before I knew it could become my life’s work. Years earlier, after leaving a high-control religious community, I went through a period of depression and confusion. I spent long stretches alone in my room, struggling to make sense of what I was feeling. One day I began doodling in a notebook. Those doodles grew into intricate abstract patterns, and I found myself spending hours making repetitive lines and shapes. I wasn’t trying to make anything meaningful or even trying to feel better. But while my hand was moving, my mind became quieter. Speaking has never come easily to me. I was an extremely quiet child, and even as an adult I know what it is like to feel so overwhelmed that I cannot organize an experience into words. Drawing asked nothing of me that I could not give. Art gave me a way to find quiet when I could not talk my way there. Years later, during the pandemic, I saw another side of what art could offer. Isolated in Atlanta, where I knew almost no one, I found comfort watching artists livestream themselves creating. Eventually, I turned the camera on myself. Nearly every week for two years, I streamed from my bedroom, inviting others to make art alongside me. Usually five to ten people joined, sometimes as many as thirty. A Discord community grew around the streams where people talked, shared their artwork, and sometimes joined voice chats while we created together. Something that had helped me through difficult periods of my own life had become a way to create connection and space for expression with others. That is why Una’s question landed so strongly. Art had already helped me find stillness when words failed and connection when I was isolated. I was also deeply interested in psychology, trauma, and healing. Art therapy brought those parts of my life together. Now, as an Art Therapy M.A. student at Lewis & Clark College, I am learning what intuition alone cannot teach: how to recognize when someone’s artwork carries more than they can yet say, and how to respond with sound clinical care under supervision. I plan to use that training to expand access to art therapy, especially for women and people of color. I have benefited from mental health care through the VA, yet every mental health professional I have encountered there has been white. I still long for the comfort of sitting across from someone who knows from lived experience what it means to move through American culture as a person of color. My long-term goal is to open an accessible art therapy studio in Portland’s Albina neighborhood, offering insurance and sliding-scale services alongside free community open studios. I want to create a place where someone does not have to arrive with the right words for what hurts. Art once gave me somewhere to put what I could not explain. As an art therapist, I want to sit beside others as they discover what creativity can hold for them.

For most of my life, I thought I simply was not good at school. I was raised by a single mother who did not graduate from high school and worked long hours to support us. There was no one at home who could help with homework or explain how college worked. I struggled academically and graduated from high school only because teachers in an alternative education program gave me the support I needed to finish. College did not feel like a realistic next step, so I enlisted in the Navy. For four years, I worked as an Aviation Electronics Technician, learning complex systems and doing work where mistakes mattered. Looking back, I was proving every day that I was capable of learning while still believing I was bad at school. When I later started college, I did not yet have the skills to stay organized and keep up with assignments. I remember opening the online grade portal, seeing how far behind I had fallen, and feeling so defeated that I stopped going to class. That only pushed me further behind. For years, I saw those failed classes as proof that higher education was not for me. Returning to school as an older adult changed that story. I learned about academic accommodations, began advocating for myself, and discovered that struggling did not mean I was incapable of learning. I completed my bachelor’s degree at age forty and am now pursuing an M.A. in Counseling with an art therapy specialization at Lewis & Clark, which will make me the first person in my family to earn a graduate degree. Being first-generation has meant learning systems while trying to succeed inside them. It has also taught me how powerful the right support can be. While working in a Veterans Resource Center, I once helped a student who feared that a GI Bill problem might force them out of school. I could not fix the bureaucracy, but I listened, found the right contact, wrote down the number, and helped them figure out what to say when they called. My goal is to become an art therapist working with veterans in accessible community mental health settings. I know how difficult it can be to ask for help and how much it matters when someone makes the path clearer. Art therapy offers another way to provide support when words alone are not enough. This scholarship would help cover living expenses and reduce the amount I need to work during graduate school. That would give me more time and energy to focus on my training, avoid burnout, and develop the skills I will eventually bring back to the communities I hope to serve. Education did more than give me a degree. It taught me how to advocate for myself and find my own way of learning. I want to spend my career helping other veterans find a way forward when they cannot yet see one for themselves.

“Shaine, have you heard of art therapy?” My drawing instructor, Una Kim, asked me this one quiet day in the studio as I worked on a sketch. I had never heard of art therapy. She explained the field and told me that mental health needed more people of color. My hand paused. I already loved art and had spent years trying to better understand the mind, trauma, and healing. Her question gave those parts of my life somewhere to meet. Una’s words carried weight because I knew what art could do when words were not enough. Years earlier, during a period of depression after leaving a high-control religious community, I sat alone in my room filling pages with intricate, abstract patterns. I was overwhelmed and struggled to explain what I was experiencing, but drawing did not require an explanation. The repetitive marks gave my attention somewhere to rest. Art gave me a way to find quiet when I could not talk my way there. I had also seen art create connection. During the pandemic, isolated in a city where I knew almost no one, I began livestreaming myself making art from my bedroom with chill music in the background. I encouraged viewers to create alongside me. People talked about their lives, shared artwork through the Discord community that grew around the streams, and sometimes joined me in live conversations while we created. I hosted these sessions nearly every week for two years, usually with five to ten people and sometimes as many as thirty. Many who gravitated toward the space were queer or people of color. What began as my own search for connection became a community where others could create and belong. That experience taught me the power of creative community, but community-building and clinical care are not the same thing. My graduate training in counseling and art therapy will teach me to assess individual needs and use art-based approaches intentionally and ethically under clinical supervision. Lived experience and intuition brought me to this work; training will prepare me to practice it responsibly. After completing my training and requirements for clinical practice, I plan to open an accessible art therapy studio in Portland’s Albina neighborhood. I spend many hours studying at the Albina Library, and being in the neighborhood has led me to learn more about its Black history. My studio will accept insurance, offer sliding-scale services, and host free community open studios, creating multiple ways to access support without cost being the deciding factor. I especially want women and people of color to feel that they belong in mental health care. I have benefited from the care available to me through the VA, yet every mental health professional I have encountered there has been white. I still long for the particular comfort of sitting across from someone who knows from lived experience what it means to move through American culture as a person of color. Seeing Una, a woman of color living her purpose, helped me recognize one of my own. This scholarship would reduce the hours I need to work during graduate school, allowing me to devote more time and energy to my clinical training. I am determined to create a space where others can recognize possibilities for themselves, too: a place where they belong in care, where creativity offers another way to be heard, and where they leave feeling empowered to shape what comes next.

After leaving a high-control religious group, I spent hours with a pen and paper, building intricate lines across the page. I was deeply depressed at the time, though I did not always know how to name it. The repetition slowed my thoughts and gave me somewhere to rest when everything felt tangled. I did not know art therapy as a field then, but drawing gave me a way to hold emotions that felt too difficult to explain. Years later, therapy, self-reflection, and education helped me understand that many reactions I once treated as personal weakness were connected to trauma and emotional neglect, along with the depression that followed. That realization changed how I see other people. I learned not to be so quick to judge what I did not understand in myself or someone else. Leaving an environment where difficult feelings were hard to name also shaped my belief that mental health care should make room for honesty. People’s reactions often make more sense when their histories are taken seriously. As a veteran and a mixed-race queer woman, I know how easily someone can feel unseen in systems meant to help them. Seeking care can mean wondering whether a provider will understand the parts of your life that shape how you move through the world. Meaningful support should not require someone to minimize who they are or translate their whole history before they can be heard. That belief has shaped the choices I have made in school and work. Studying psychology alongside art practice has given me language for something I first learned through drawing: creative work can help people approach what feels overwhelming. At the Veteran Resource Center, I help welcome student veterans at the front desk and support events that make connection easier. I also suggested making an unused guitar available with strings, a chord book, and basic supplies. Seeing it become a simple way for students to decompress reminded me that support does not always begin with a formal conversation. Sometimes it begins with a space that gives someone room to settle before they are ready to ask for help. I have also been accepted into a master’s program in art therapy, where I will deepen my training in trauma-informed care and learn how to use creative processes in ways shaped by each client’s needs. As an art therapist, I hope to work with veterans and people from BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities who are carrying experiences that feel difficult to approach directly. Art can offer a gentler place to begin. A client might choose a material, make an image, or repeat a mark before they are ready to speak about a painful experience in full. Alongside conversation, creative work can help people move toward what they are carrying at their own pace. Years ago, drawing line after line gave me a place to begin when I did not know how to explain what I was carrying. As an art therapist, I hope to help others find their own place to begin.

A student veteran once came into the Veterans Resource Center clearly overwhelmed. They were trying to manage school, work, appointments, and financial stress all at once, and by the time they sat down, they looked exhausted. I remember helping them slow down enough to figure out the next step instead of trying to solve everything at once. In moments like that, I learned that support is not always something dramatic. Sometimes it is being treated with patience, dignity, and care when life feels unmanageable. I was raised by a single mother in a low-income household where survival often felt more immediate than long-term planning. My mom never finished high school, so for a long time college felt like something meant for other people, not me. As a mixed-race Black woman navigating higher education, there were times I felt out of place in academic spaces and unsure whether I truly belonged there. Learning to see myself as someone worthy of higher education has been its own process. My family’s history in Portland also shaped the way I understand resilience and community care. Part of my family came to Portland during the Great Migration searching for more opportunity and stability. Like many Black families at the time, they later had to rebuild after the Vanport Flood destroyed entire communities. I grew up aware that rebuilding and relying on community support were part of the legacy I came from. Before I ever learned what art therapy was, art was already something I turned to during difficult periods in my life. Drawing and creating gave me a way to process emotions that were hard to explain out loud. At the same time, I became deeply interested in psychology and understanding how people heal and cope with painful experiences. Discovering art therapy helped me realize that the same thing that helped me survive emotionally could also become a way to support people who are carrying pain they may not know how to name yet. This fall, I will begin the Master of Arts in Art Therapy program at Lewis & Clark College. In the future, I hope to help create accessible community arts programs where people can make art, process emotions, and feel connected without needing wealth or prior experience to participate. I think often about the people who feel intimidated by clinical environments or who never see themselves reflected in traditional mental health spaces. I want to help build programs that feel welcoming, grounded, and human, especially for underserved communities and people carrying trauma who may not know how to put their experiences into words yet. Getting to this point has taken persistence, self-belief, and the support of people who encouraged me to continue even when higher education felt out of reach. This scholarship would help relieve financial pressure as I continue into graduate school, but it would also support the larger goal behind my education: giving back to the communities that shaped me and helping create places where more people can feel safe enough to make, reflect, and begin healing.

I am pursuing a graduate degree in mental health because I know what it feels like to need support and not really know how to get it. I grew up in a low-income home with a single mother who did not finish high school. My mom worked hard, and I understand that more deeply now than I did when I was younger. Still, there was a lot she had to carry, and school was something I mostly had to figure out on my own. I remember sitting at the kitchen table with worksheets spread out in front of me, staring at the page long enough for the numbers and words to start blurring together. I did not know how to ask for help without feeling embarrassed. Most of the time, I just felt stuck. That feeling followed me for years. I struggled in school, and after a while I stopped seeing those struggles as something I could work through. They started to feel like proof of something about me. Like maybe I just was not one of those people who knew how to do school well. Returning to school later in life has changed that, but not all at once. I have had to rebuild my confidence one class at a time. For me, that has been its own kind of drive. I will be the first person in my family to earn a graduate degree. That means a lot to me, not only because of what it represents personally, but because of what it took to get here. It took coming back when it would have been easier not to. It took learning how to stay with hard things instead of assuming I was not capable. It took believing that a different future might still be possible for me. Art has been part of that shift in a real way. I think about one afternoon in the studio working on a charcoal self-portrait. I kept reworking the same part of the face because it looked flat on the page, while what I saw in the mirror felt more complicated than that. My hands were covered in charcoal dust. There were little eraser crumbs all over the table. I was frustrated, but I was also fully there with the drawing. For once my mind was not racing ahead or beating me up. It was quiet enough for me to stay with what I was seeing. Art gave me a way to process things I could not easily say out loud. It helped me feel more present, more honest, and more connected to myself. That is why I am pursuing graduate training in mental health through art therapy. I want to work with people from communities that are often overlooked, especially those who may not feel comfortable opening up in a space that depends only on talking. I want to support people who shut down, and people who have learned to keep everything inside. I am especially drawn to serving veterans and other underserved communities. I want training that meets people with real care and skill, and that treats art as another path toward healing when words are not ready yet. Graduate school is the next step in that path. It will help me turn what I know and what I have learned into work that can genuinely support other people. That is the direction I keep coming back to, and it feels worth following.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a Marine. I had a black pair of boots that I wore almost every day. During recess, I would hang from the monkey bars doing pull-ups, pretending I was in boot camp. The jungle gym became an obstacle course. When other kids were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, they usually said doctor, lawyer, nurse, or firefighter. I remember saying with my whole chest, “I want to be a Marine!” My dad was a Marine. He joined the service soon after I was born, and even though we didn’t live together, that part of him felt constant. Something I could hold onto. But there was distance in it too. I didn’t see him every day. I didn’t know what his life looked like most of the time. What I had were pieces—summer visits, holidays, stories, the image of him in uniform. I think that’s part of why I held onto it so tightly. It gave shape to something that otherwise felt far away. I remember visiting him on base one summer. The first thing I noticed was how quiet everything felt. At one point, he stopped to adjust the crease on his sleeve, smoothing it down with his hand before we kept walking. I stayed close beside him, trying to match his pace, noticing how people greeted him as we passed. There was a kind of respect in it that I didn’t have words for yet, but I felt it. Looking back now, that mattered more than I realized. I didn’t just want to be a Marine. I wanted to be close to him. The Marines were the clearest way I understood him, so they became the clearest way I understood how to stay connected. When I grew up, I didn’t become a Marine. I joined the Navy. Before I enlisted, I remember asking him what it was really like, not the version I imagined as a kid, but the day-to-day of it. He told me there would be days I wouldn’t want to get up, and that no one would do it for me. But he also said I’d learn what I was capable of if I stayed. That conversation stayed with me. There were years between that playground and that decision, but talking to him like that felt different. Less like I was trying to follow him, and more like I was starting to understand him. That time on the monkey bars didn’t go to waste. In basic training, pull-ups weren’t part of the required testing, but there was an event called the Captain’s Cup. It was like the Olympics between divisions. One of the events was pull-ups. I did the most out of all the other women competing. Hanging there, pushing through those last reps, I remember feeling something click. Not just pride in what I could do, but a quiet understanding of where it started and what it had taken for him long before me. I never became a Marine, but I carried him with me anyway.

“Hey Shaine, don’t you have class today?” My roommate knocked softly. I was on the floor, staring at the ceiling. I knew I had class. I also knew I had not gone in weeks. Assignments were overdue. Emails sat unopened. The longer I stayed away, the heavier it felt to return. This pattern was not new. Since high school, overwhelm followed a familiar rhythm. Fall behind, blame my own discipline, avoid until avoidance became its own problem. What confused me was that I could function inside structure. In the Navy, my days were scheduled to the hour. There was accountability and a team counting on me. I performed well. But in college, without that scaffolding, I kept collapsing in ways I could not explain. A friend suggested I talk to disability services. I was skeptical. I did not think a diagnosis was waiting for me that would make things easier. I made the appointment anyway. It was the first time I chose to interrupt the pattern instead of letting it repeat. The ADHD diagnosis did not feel dramatic. It felt clarifying. The language around executive function explained what I had been carrying as personal failure. It named the difficulty initiating tasks, the gaps in working memory, and the trouble estimating time. Suddenly the distance between what I was capable of and what I could consistently produce had a name, and that name came with strategies instead of shame. Support changed the pace. I met with advisors. We mapped assignments week by week. I learned to break work into pieces instead of staring at it until it felt impossible. It was awkward at first to admit I needed help. It was steadier than pretending I did not. One afternoon, close to missing another deadline, I wrote a short email to my professor asking for an extension, something the old version of me would never have done. The reply was simple and kind. I finished the assignment. I stayed enrolled. I passed classes I would have failed before. Over time, my GPA rose by more than a full point. The change felt less like a breakthrough and more like finding solid ground I could return to. Around the same time, I was working at a Veterans Resource Center. A veteran came in upset about a benefits issue. On the surface it looked like anger. I recognized the look underneath it because I had worn it myself. We sat down, pulled out the resource binder, and broke the process into steps they could follow. As the conversation slowed, their shoulders dropped. They left with a plan. In that moment, I saw how structure and patience can shift someone from overwhelm to agency, the same shift I had experienced. That experience continues to shape my path toward art therapy. I want to offer others living with disabilities a place where they can slow down, organize what feels unmanageable, and begin again. Drawing gives form to thoughts that do not easily translate into words and creates a space where pressure softens enough for insight to emerge. This scholarship honors Dylan, who carried a disability from childhood and still found his way through college. His story reminds me that support is not a detour from the path, but part of how we stay on it. I have learned how to ask for help before I disappear from my own life, and I carry that forward in how I show up for others. Months after that morning on the floor, I passed my roommate heading out. “Where are you headed?” they asked. “To class,” I said.

There was a moment in the Veterans Resource Center, a space I know both as a student and as a Navy veteran, where I started to understand what access really looks like. A student walked in, overwhelmed, holding a stack of papers and trying to make sense of deadlines, benefits, and coursework. They paused near the entrance, unsure where to begin. I recognized that feeling. The pressure to figure everything out quickly, to not fall behind, to hold it together when things feel scattered. We sat down, opened a few tabs, and began working through things step by step. What felt impossible a few minutes earlier became something they could move through. As a student studying psychology and art, I’ve had to find ways to work with material that doesn’t come easily. I remember sitting at my desk late at night, a dense journal article open in front of me, reading the same paragraph over and over without it landing. That’s when I started changing how I approached learning. Instead of forcing myself to push through, I began using tools more intentionally. I use Natural Reader to listen to articles when my focus starts to slip, which helps me stay with the material. In my psychology courses, I use NotebookLM to break down ideas around trauma, attention, and emotional regulation, then revisit them as audio to connect theory to what I see at the Veterans Resource Center. The biggest shift came from learning how to stay present. During my transition out of the military, I started noticing how often my attention would drop out without warning. On those days, I use the Muse app for meditation, before studying or drawing, to notice when I’m beginning to tense or check out and reset instead of walking away. Over time, I’ve stopped seeing learning as something I have to force, and started seeing it as something I can return to intentionally. That shift has extended beyond my own work. At the Veterans Resource Center, I’ve worked with students who come in frustrated or mentally overloaded. In one case, a student was trying to understand their VA education benefits while also keeping up with assignments they were behind on. I sat with them, helped organize tasks into smaller steps, and walked through one form at a time. As we worked, their pace slowed, their questions became clearer, and what started as confusion became manageable. That approach comes directly from how I’ve learned to regulate my own attention. In my art practice, taking a moment to settle my attention before drawing changes what I see. Proportions, weight, and small shifts in form become clearer. Attention changes what is available to you. Online learning, for me, is not just about flexibility. It’s about access in a deeper sense. It creates multiple ways to engage, especially for people navigating stress, transition, or mental fatigue. My transition from the Navy to the classroom was the first step. My next is a graduate program in art therapy, where I intend to bridge psychological understanding with creative practice to support veteran communities. Not everyone learns the same way, and some need support simply to stay present. Online tools have helped me meet myself where I am. They’ve also shown me how I might meet others where they are. Because sometimes learning doesn’t start with having the right answer. It starts with finding a way to stay.