I remember I was at work when the news that Roe v. Wade had been overturned reached me. I remember going home and asking my mom if she had seen the news, as well as sharing posts expressing my feelings regarding the decision. I remember feeling joy at this news, but I also felt fear. It was not fear regarding my rights as a woman being taken away but fear at the misinformation being spread and most of all that there would be some pro-lifers who believed the fight was over, while in all reality our fight was only beginning. There would still be women feeling alone and facing crisis pregnancies and needing help, while misinformation was still being spread. The aftermath of Roe v. Wade was a great opportunity for pro-lifers to rise up and show that we really do care about women as much as her child. I have always been pro-life as my mother is Catholic and pro-life. High school was when I began to explore and expand this part of my identity. I attended the March for Life twice and joined my school’s Students for Life club, becoming an officer during my last two years. It was during this time that I discovered the consistent life ethic and pro-life feminism. I follow pro-life and consistent life ethic accounts on all of my social media accounts and the more I interact with them, the more my conviction in the pro-life movement grows. The pro-life position says that life begins at conception, while the pro-choice side has different answers or beliefs for when life begins (at first breath, at a certain month/week, etc.). The pro-life position also says that you are valuable even if you are ‘unwanted’ or if you were conceived consensually or not. I find this quote by Dr. Mildred Jefferson helpful in summing up my attraction “I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to life”. The college I currently attend does not have a pro-life club, however, there was some talk among my friends and me about starting one (especially since there is a Planned Parenthood Generation on campus). Even though I am not involved in a Pro-life club I can still find other ways to show my support of the cause. I can donate to organizations like Let Them Live (and look into their Social Media Ambassador page) and wear shirts with pro-life messages. My laptop has a consistent life ethic sticker and I had a ‘pro-life feminist’ phone case. My pro-life activism also extends to my social media as I share posts containing information and donation links. I am a social work major and while I find it hard to pinpoint what exactly drew me to this major, my current reasonings involve both my feminism and consistent life ethic/pro-life values. While my plans for my social work degree involve working with kids or helping survivors of domestic violence, I hope to also one day be able to use my degree to work with either a pregnancy crisis center or an organization like Let Them Live or New Wave Feminists.

There are multiple ways I could answer this but, upon thinking there was only one answer I could choose, my creativity. As a writer, a reader, and an individual in general my creativity is something that I can't live without. I started reading at a young age and my love for it has only grown. My favorite genre quickly became fantasy. I loved reading about these lands complete with magic, adventure, and fairy tale elements. There's an element of imagination with any story, but with fantasy it's different. These worlds don't exist and so the only way we can see them is in our minds. While I have always admired how these authors can think of these stories, my desire to be an author as well has given me a new appreciation for the work that goes into writing stories. Getting an idea in my head, whether it's a quote, a character, or the beginnings of a kingdom, is a feeling that I love. I love opening that blank word document and writing down whatever popped into my head and then watching that grow. Seeing that one character description grow into a fleshed-out world complete with a magic system, multiple plot points, and of course, a plethora of LGBT+ characters is something I'll never tire of. But at the end of the day, nothing compares to starting to write. Opening yet another blank document, but this time for an entirely different purpose. The National Novel Writing Month competition has been a great motivator for me. My creativity has been with me for a long time and I don't know what I would do without it. It has been with me through all walks of life and I plan on it being with me far into the future as well.

Reading was the first to become a hobby and it has stuck around the longest. My love of reading was started at a young age helped by the Book-it challenges in grade school. The hobby has grown from joining a competitive reading group (Page 1) to memorizing my library card number. My book collection has grown over the years helped by events like the Lincoln Library Book Sale, and websites like BookOutlet and Book of the Month. I have also started a Youtube channel for discussing books which I hope to grow in the future. With how the reading has stayed with me it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that becoming an author would become a dream job of mine. At first this idea was accompanied by dozens of ideas written in various notebooks and word documents on the family computer. While I have discarded many of those ideas, they were still an important part of finding what stories I wanted to spend time on. These stories now contain characters that I can see myself in which usually means LGBT+ characters particularly asexual and religious queer characters. While I do enjoy the thought of being able to provide representation that I rarely see, being able to create worlds out of nothing for fantasy and sci-fi books is extremely attractive as well. The annual competition NaNoWriMo (which stands for National Novel Writing Month) has also helped me actually put words on a page also and something I enjoy participating in and have completed twice. While reading and writing are not my only hobbies, they are my favorites and the ones I spend most of my time on. These two hobbies have been around the longest and I can not imagine a future where neither one is in my life.