When I was three years old, I wanted to be a firefighter. Driving a red truck and saving lives was the dream. At five, I dreamt of being an artist, at seven a teacher, at eight a chef, and as the years flew by, I was a flight attendant, pediatrician, actress, engineer, film director, and lawyer. I was the kid who wanted to do everything. That didn't change at school; I was always well-rounded, the STEM kid who took multiple language arts classes in a year yet loved my biology labs more than anything. When I told my parents I wanted to go into medicine, they weren't surprised. I changed my mind about my future all the time. Instead of switching, I spent my sophomore year engrossed in learning about the healthcare system. My parents watched in awe as, for the first time, I had my sights set on a dream. My mom had a hard time understanding my passion. We watched the "One World: Together At Home" show during the pandemic, and when they showed tributes to the frontline healthcare workers and showed what they were going through, we both cried. She asked me then if I was sure this was what I wanted to do. I saw the fear in her eyes as a mother, and the question stopped me short. The truth is, watching what happened to the world, I never once considered changing my mind. A few years later now, I am a Reproductive Rights and Health Intern at my university, and I am just as passionate - if not more so - about medicine as I was that day with my mother on the couch. I dream of being an OBGYN and being able to bridge the gap between compassionate day-to-day clinical care and the social and political activism that is needed to make sure that everybody is able to get the medical care that they deserve. The capacity of the female reproductive system blows me away every day, and the lack of research and knowledge about it makes me angry. I want to provide that care and contribute to the research and knowledge that is so desperately needed. I want to be a doctor. I hope to build a life of bringing medicine to people who don't have access to it. I want to work for doctors without borders, help women understand their bodies better, and build programs that support trust between healthcare institutions and communities. When I was three years old, I wanted to save lives as a firefighter. At seventeen, I'm not very different.

When I was three years old, I wanted to be a firefighter. Driving a red truck and saving lives was the dream. At five, I dreamt of being an artist, at seven a teacher, at eight a chef, and as the years flew by, I was going to be a flight attendant, pediatrician, actress, engineer, film director, and lawyer. I was the kid who wanted to do everything. That didn't change at school; I was always well-rounded, the STEM kid who took multiple language arts classes in a year yet loved my biology labs more than anything. When I told my parents I wanted to go into medicine, they weren't surprised. I changed my mind about my future all the time. Instead of switching, though, I spent my sophomore year engrossed in learning about the healthcare system. My parents watched in awe as, for the first time, I had my sights set on a dream. My mom had a hard time understanding my passion. We watched the "One World: Together At Home" show during the pandemic, and when they showed tributes to the frontline healthcare workers and showed what they were going through, we both cried. She asked me then if I was sure this was what I wanted to do. I saw the fear in her eyes as a mother, and the question stopped me short. The truth is, watching what happened to the world, I never once considered changing my mind. I am strong, passionate, and smart, and I know that whatever I do in life, it will involve fighting to make the world a better place, but I am not a violent fighter. I could never bring myself to fight a literal battle, intentionally harming one person to save another. This, on the other hand, was a war I could fight. This was a war I wanted to fight. My passions for medicine kept building upon themselves and solidifying. For the first time that summer, I read about Paul Farmer, learning how he used his medical experience to help communities build the healthcare systems that they desperately needed, systems that worked for them. I became a certified Emergency Medical Responder and immediately signed up as a teaching assistant for the next EMR class. I desperately wanted to bring my love for everything I learned to a new group of people. I kept reading book after book by doctors and patients, absorbing everything I could about their stories, diseases, and systems. I want to be a doctor. I hope to build a life of bringing medicine to people who don't have access to it. I want to work for doctors without borders, help women understand their bodies better, and build programs that support trust between healthcare institutions and communities. When I was three years old, I wanted to save lives as a firefighter. Now in college, I'm not very different.

I'm born to be somebody, then somebody comes from me / I'll show you where I did swim team [reaper] I am lying on the floor, in my bed, in the shower, curled in a ball and doubled over in a loud and endless kind of pain, one so messily tied up in girlhood. I have always found strength in my mother, but the legend of 'mother’ is one that carries more weight than I am sure I know how to shoulder, and I lay there, wondering what my future looks like. How can I be an OBGYN if even though I love the idea of taking a child to the pools where I taught swim lessons, I can't imagine doing anything else to this organ that feels like a curse? I'm doing it for my future self [management] This girlhood is a heavy thing, but it is what I make it. I have a lot of fight in me, and even doubled over in pain, I know that I will be okay. I fight for women - those who are told they are not, those who face the pain I do, those who birth the children I may raise and those I won't, those that I love, those that I came from. I will work my way to medical school and I will treat them with empathy and medicine. I square my shoulders. I am in pain, but I am strong. In the dead heat and the suffocating wet grip / That's got a hold on my mama, it's Marietta's kiss [zinnias] People like to tell me I was born an adult, and while I have loved my childhood it has always felt like a thing a bit outgrown. My parents moved to Marietta a year before I was born, and I have been ready to leave ever since I knew there were roads to take me. I worked every night for every test, for every essay, for every college, for every scholarship to carry me down that road without going into so much debt that I can't afford medical school. I hug my mother, and she understands - I get it from her. This city will always be my roots, but it was never going to be the whole tree. Sofia, know that you and I / Shouldn't feel like a crime [sofia] "So, I heard you're dating someone." My whole body freezes up. I thought these muscles were my own, I thought these lungs were supposed to inflate, I thought these hands could be still when I commanded them. I thought I was bigger than this fear. I hang up the phone as quickly as my shorted brain can come up with a slight excuse and my mother tells me I should never be ashamed. I tell her that there is a difference between shame and fear. I don't want to say goodbye / And I think that we could do it if we tried [sofia] I am afraid of what this world will do to me because of my love, yes, but I also know that I am nothing if not brave. I am defined not by my fears but by my love, and so my love will always be my guidepost. I will love passionately and without hesitation; I will love my family, my friends, strangers, and this girl. I think that I will always be a little bit afraid, but I can be defined by my love if I try. And I will spend my whole life trying.

When I was three years old, I wanted to be a firefighter. Driving a red truck and saving lives was the dream. At five, I dreamt of being an artist, at seven a teacher, at eight a chef, and as the years flew by, I was a flight attendant, pediatrician, actress, engineer, film director, and lawyer. I was the kid who wanted to do everything. That didn't change at school; I was always well-rounded, the STEM kid who took multiple language arts classes in a year yet loved my biology labs more than anything. When I told my parents I wanted to go into medicine, they weren't surprised. I changed my mind about my future all the time. Instead of switching, I spent my sophomore year engrossed in learning about the healthcare system. My parents watched in awe as, for the first time, I had my sights set on a dream. My mom had a hard time understanding my passion. We watched the "One World: Together At Home" show during the pandemic, and when they showed tributes to the frontline healthcare workers and showed what they were going through, we both cried. She asked me then if I was sure this was what I wanted to do. I saw the fear in her eyes as a mother, and the question stopped me short. The truth is, watching what happened to the world, I never once considered changing my mind. I am strong, passionate, and smart, and I know that whatever I do in life will involve fighting to make the world a better place, but I am not a violent fighter. I could never bring myself to fight a literal battle, intentionally harming one person to save another. This, on the other hand, was a war I could fight. This was a war I wanted to fight. My passions for medicine kept building upon themselves and solidifying. For the first time that summer, I read about Paul Farmer, learning how he used his medical experience to help communities build the healthcare systems that they desperately needed, systems that worked for them. I became a certified Emergency Medical Responder and immediately signed up as a teaching assistant for the next EMR class. I desperately wanted to bring my love for everything I learned to a new group of people. I kept reading book after book by doctors and patients, absorbing everything I could about their stories, diseases, and systems. My interests are still broad - in college I hope to double major in Public Health and something else liberal arts-related (international relations, public policy, comparative literature, and linguistics are some of my favorite passions) to give me an interdisciplinary background that I can use to help improve lives and communities in a healthcare setting. I have always been called to the interdisciplinary nature of STEAM. I hope to use that background to work in community healthcare, using community support as a prevention and mitigation tool to improve the health of communities and increase access to healthcare. I believe that caring for health on a large scale begins with caring for communities. I want to be a doctor. I hope to build a life of bringing medicine to people who don't have access to it. I want to work for doctors without borders, help women understand their bodies better, and build programs that support trust between healthcare institutions and communities. When I was three years old, I wanted to save lives as a firefighter. At seventeen, I'm not very different.

Of all of the football games that I've been to in high school, it isn't any of the firsts, the lasts, or the homecomings that stay with me the most. My favorite football game, whose memories line the beginnings of a best friendship and whose pictures plaster my phone case, was in the middle of the season sophomore year. I only knew a few people who were going - I tagged along with a few friends as they went to hang out with their volleyball team, and I was terrified that I would feel shut out of the group. Instead, all the girls that I had never met welcomed me into their lives with open arms, and that night I experienced the magic of their bonds in an environment like a football game that has energy as lively as its pulsing heartbeat, the magic that has carried me through the rest of high school. We had the time of our lives that night, dancing around in high ponytails and hawaiian shirts, taking millions of pictures and loving every one, and cheering when we find out that we're winning, for the first time in a long time, even though we didn’t know the first thing about how the game is played. Suddenly, in the middle of our rambunctious photography session, our new principal walked by and before any of us knew what was happening, one of my friends shouted out "Will you take a picture with us?” We all froze, except for our principal, and with the insistence “only if I can pose like you,” suddenly we were spending the night sorority-squatting with our principal. I find happiness in my friendships. Sometimes happiness is about taking yourself a little less seriously and letting yourself love.

I have always been a girl filled with dreams, putting myself in the shoes of a dozen different professionals each week, imaging the ways I would change lives and communities. In high school, thrust into a larger and more cynical world than any I had known before, I was faced with a daunting reality: the world is large and scary, and my little dreams wouldn’t stand a chance at changing it. That is where Mia West found me. A baker who left on a humanitarian trip when her life fell apart, the protagonist of The Enlightenment of Bees was confronted with the fact that she didn’t know how to make a difference in the world without leaving herself behind. Working in Hungary during the refugee crisis, she hated the work at the clinic where she volunteered. Even just as a young teenager, I understood the feeling. I knew what it was like to have big dreams that didn’t feel big enough. That didn’t feel worthy enough. For the first time, I was looking at a young woman who wanted to create things and change the world. For the first time, I saw in a character the struggle to do good while remaining true to oneself. For the first time, I saw a girl who valued her identity and celebrated it, finding a way to do something new and noteworthy. For the first time, I saw my own struggle celebrated and solved in a way that made me feel hopeful about my future. Mia founded a bakery of her own, hiring and training refugees so that they could start a new life. I still reread that book when I need a reminder that I can figure it out. That my dreams are worthy enough to make a difference.

I have been incredibly fortunate to grow up in a community where I, and the people that I am directly surrounded with, have access to healthcare. However, from a young age, it has been clear to me that that is not the case for a huge portion of the population. In the United States, there is an extensive network of healthcare systems - the problem is that they are simply not accessible to many communities. This happens for many reasons: people cannot afford care, have generational mistrust in the healthcare system, simply do not know what care they need or how to access it, or countless combinations of these and a host of other problems. My dream is to spend my life as a doctor working in community healthcare. I did a semester-long research project in my junior year in which I researched community healthcare systems and actually created a portfolio of project designs for research-based community healthcare programs for a fictional clinic in Chicago. I learned the importance of understanding the community that a system aims to serve and finding ways to meet them where they are. One important facet of the program I designed was a program for community health workers based on the model developed by the organization Partners In Health. These workers would be community members hired and trained to visit people in their homes and community centers, bringing education to the population and checking on patients who do not reliably complete their treatment regimen or access their healthcare system; hiring from within the community promotes trust and provides economic benefits to struggling communities. When I started my internship this semester at the Cobb County Fire department, I learned that we have a similar program. One of my favorite things to do at my internship is to ride with the Cobb CARES team, who connect people who don’t have the ability to care for themselves with resources that can help them. Expanding programs like these is how I hope to make my mark on the world. I am ultimately a firm believer that changing the world must begin with changing lives - I believe that working with the unique and specific needs of communities is the best way to do so. I don't say this as an “if I could” statement. I know, especially with the right education and opportunities, I am capable. I intend on changing history by changing the world, by changing communities, by changing people's lives. The way I want to do that is by bringing healthcare to communities.

I have never been a quiet person, never minded getting up on a stage, never felt uncomfortable pouring out sentences and paragraphs, but until seventh grade, I was never comfortable putting the weight of myself behind my words, never comfortable telling someone they were wrong, never comfortable claiming confidence in my ideas. As dramatic as it sounds, that changed when I started debate. A pimple-covered pree-teen that signed up for a whirlwind of policy and public speaking, in that classroom I found myself in the midst of something that I had never felt before. All of a sudden, I was learning to hold my ground on matters that mattered to me. Making all the difference were the people I had to look up to: a friend’s older sibling, an incredible coach, and the judges. The judges, parents and teachers and students who saw what that program did for us and volunteered on their weekends, who listened to middle-schoolers talk at them for hours, who built us up and taught us how to be better. Now that I am in high school, I spend whatever Saturdays I can returning to my debate league as a judge. I sit with the kids from my middle school before the tournaments, and I sit in the front of classrooms as nervous kids like me stand up and find their footing for the first time. I know from firsthand experience the importance and impact of having someone who can give you constructive criticism, the kind of person who can build you up, make you better, and be someone to look up to. I try to be that person.

To me, writing is biology. Dissection, examining knowledge, ideas, and people, exploring the most hidden corners of each, the extraction of the most core pieces, the reduction to one's very essence is biological, and flows through my blood, residing in my bones. But when asked to speak on my own being or emotions, a wall is built between my mouth and the rest of me, a dam that stops the usual flow of words. Writing helps me solve this problem - it's as if I have found a loophole. Picking up a pen or laying my fingers on a keyboard seems to pull me out of my body and set me outside of myself. Looking myself up and down, I can reach into the very depths of myself, past every bit of blood, muscle, and bone that tightened and stood in my way, and find my very essence. With the fine-tuned ease of a neurosurgeon, I can gently pull it out of my body, laying it down. I uncover parts of myself that I never knew existed and lay them out for examination behind a pane of viewing glass in the form of a sheet of paper. I can safely document myself like I am analyzing a character in a novel. It is the act of writing that allows me to have the courage to share myself in a way talking never could, making everything inside of me seem suddenly manageable and explainable. Writing is biology. It is my natural manner of making my way through the world. It is how I manage my intense desire to learn and know everything I can - the way I process, sort, and understand myself and the world around me. It is anatomical, intrinsic, and above all, intensely ingrained in who I am.

When I was three years old, I wanted to be a firefighter. Driving a red truck and saving lives was the dream. At five, I dreamt of being an artist, at seven a teacher, at eight a chef, and as the years flew by, I was a flight attendant, pediatrician, actress, engineer, film director, and lawyer. I was the kid who wanted to do everything. That didn't change at school; I was always well-rounded, the STEM kid who took multiple language arts classes in a year yet loved my biology labs more than anything. I changed my mind about my future all the time, but when I told my parents I wanted to go into medicine, they watched for the first time as I had my sights set, unwavering, on a dream. My mom had a hard time understanding my passion. We watched the "One World: Together At Home" show during the pandemic, and when they showed tributes to the frontline healthcare workers we both cried. She asked me then if I was sure this was what I wanted to do. I saw the fear in her eyes as a mother, watching all those people fighting so hard, and the question stopped me short. The truth is, watching what happened to the world, I never once considered changing my mind. This was a war I could fight. This was a war I wanted to fight. I want to be a doctor. I hope to build a life of bringing medicine to people who don't have access to it, helping women understand their bodies better, and building programs that support trust between healthcare institutions and communities. When I was three years old, I wanted to save lives as a firefighter. At seventeen, I'm not much different.

I am, somewhat embarrassingly as a teenager, not a night person. I am happily in bed long before eleven most nights, and up with my alarm just before seven. Once a week, though, I wake up at five in the morning, stumble out of bed in the dark, fumble for the clothes I laid out the night before, grab my bags, and tip-toe out the door without waking up the rest of my family. I drive to my best friend's house, pick her up, and we go on a hike before school. It's a small tradition, and most Wednesday mornings I hate myself a little bit in that moment when I hear the blaring of my alarm. But on our favorite hike, there is a fallen tree facing the river on the East. Over many mornings of practice, we have learned to time our morning just right so that we make it to that log a few minutes before sunrise - just enough time to pull out some yogurt or overnight oats that we can eat as we sit side by side, watching the sky explode into light. That weekly sunrise with my best friend is my favorite simple pleasure. There's something about experiencing nature with someone you love that I can't quite put into words, but makes the whole rest of my week infinitely better. Something about that pleasure brings peace.

For Christmas this year, I gave my friend a pair of socks and MiO water flavorings. As random or impersonal as that may seem, she cried when she opened it. The socks were designed by one of her favorite artists, and I got her the water flavorings because she had told me that she liked them - unlike the chocolate I got for my other friends. This isn't a world-changing story, but my friend had been having a really rough few weeks, and knowing that there was someone who took the time to listen to her and come up with something thoughtful made a difference. I have a lot of dreams in my life, and most of them add up to the fact that I want to make the world a better place. I believe that starts with listening; you can't fix problems unless you understand them. And sometimes, the best thing you can do about a problem is just let someone know that you are listening. I'm not going to create world peace simply by listening and letting people know that I hear them, but I see the difference that it makes. I believe that I will make the world a better place, one moment of kindness and active listening at a time.