She walks in beauty; her name is truth.

I am not the sum of my interests or my accomplishments. I am not defined by my physical location, my family, or tradition. I am not my friends, nor am I the people that I associate with. But these people and things, tangible and abstract, are all me; they are juxtaposed together to govern a living being. Together we are discovering what we were made to be. I am what I am willing to become. I am what I am willing to discover. I am what I have already learned and what I have yet to learn. I am the sum of my brief experiences. They have formed me and with time they have become the mold that I fit into perfectly. Sometimes these experiences were like a gentle sculptor’s hands: soft, refining and patient. These hands held that, “I will wait for you to change. My presence around you is consistent. I will guide you into a different shape with more beauty and understanding of what is around you.” Sometimes these experiences are the cumbersome, unsteady hands that take a beautiful, articulate vase and shatter it into many pieces. I become undistinguishable. These hands that take hold of me are not careful; they are not mindful of me.
For me, to write is to be alive. It is essential. Words, more than anything else, tell my story. In times of trouble, I have little to say. The brief notes, the reflections that I ponder about and the questions that I muse over, while they usually scatter my room, my binder, and the receipts in my purse, are scarce. I stop writing when I cease to thrive. In my moments of utmost clarity and sincerity, I am brimming with new ideas that boil in my chest. They originate in my beating heart and they spill onto paper. I am excited to brush them around on the surface, to paint in missing details and finally, like an artist, create a masterpiece. My World Literature teacher, Jill Darley, says that we should write to discover something. If we have a question, we should approach it through writing. Carlos Fuentes says that, “Writing is a struggle against silence,” and Thomas Mann says, “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” I believe both of these statements are true. When I have something to say, I write. To not write means, for me, to be defeated in a struggle. This art is necessary for my well-being, and so it is a challenge.