Education saved my life. Simple as that. It was someone’s education who figured out the procedure to correct strabismus, and another surgeon’s education to perform it on me, so that this girl who should have been partially blind can get away with (arguably thick) glasses. It was a pharmacist’s education that condensed iron into a tablet, so I don’t get lightheaded from my anemia, and a lab technician’s education that found the diminished iron in my blood in the first place. It was an engineer’s education, and then a car manufacturer’s, that designed safer cars so that this former permit holder suffered no more than her dad’s exasperation when his car crashed into the curb. And it was a teacher’s education that brought her into the classroom to my third-grade self and, without either of us realizing it at the time, set me on the path of pursuing teaching myself. When I walked into her classroom, I was so shy I had trouble starting conversations. But she pushed me and challenged me not just in my academics, but also in my way of thinking. By the end of that year, I hadn't just learned Math and Science but also how to listen, and how to be heard. That’s why I want to get a degree and become a teacher: to help the next generation understand what they've learned within the world's larger context. Chances are these students, once they graduate, won’t be articulating the symbolism of Gatsby’s green light; they will, however, be watching the news, and have to analyze both what’s said and isn’t said to come to a rounded conclusion of what occurred. They might not be crafting classical argument pieces about whether schools should implement an honor code system; they could, however, have to disagree with their parents’ beliefs in a professional and kind yet persuasive manner. They probably won’t devour twenty-five books by the end of the semester to achieve an A; they will, however, be required to consider others’ stories, lifestyles, and dreams--even if they differ from their own. And it’s my hope, like any educator, to have some small part in getting these future students to this point. Education is all around us. The refining and enhancing of a skill set are necessary for society. Education isn’t frivolous, or unnecessarily time-consuming, or brainwashing in disguise; it’s a vital part of life. My life included.

Please see the attached file and ignore everything else put into this box. It will not allow me to submit unless 400 words are in the "essay" portion. Unless, of course, you've been waiting your entire life to learn about Wikipedia's questionable knowledge of lynxes. In that case, please, my friend, greatness awaits: A lynx (/lɪŋks/;[3] plural lynx or lynxes[4]) is any of the four especie (the Canada lynx, Iberian lynx, Eurasian lynx, or bobcat) within the medium-sized wild cat genus Lynx. The name lynx originated in Middle English via Latin from the Greek word λύγξ,[3] derived from the Indo-European root leuk- ('light, brightness')[5] in reference to the luminescence of its reflective eyes.[5] Contents 1 Appearance 2 Species 2.1 Eurasian lynx 2.2 Canada lynx 2.3 Iberian lynx 2.4 Bobcat 3 Behavior and diet 4 Distribution and habitat 4.1 Europe and Asia 4.2 North America 5 See also 6 References 7 External links Appearance Profile view of a lynx Lynx have a short tail, characteristic tufts of black hair on the tips of their ears, large, padded paws for walking on snow and long whiskers on the face. Under their neck, they have a ruff, which has black bars resembling a bow tie, although this is often not visible. Body colour varies from medium brown to goldish to beige-white, and is occasionally marked with dark brown spots, especially on the limbs. All species of lynx have white fur on their chests, bellies and on the insides of their legs, fur which is an extension of the chest and belly fur. The lynx's colouring, fur length and paw size vary according to the climate in their range. In the Southwestern United States, they are short-haired, dark in colour and their paws are smaller and less padded. As climates get colder and more northerly, lynx have progressively thicker fur, lighter colour, and their paws are larger and more padded to adapt to the snow. Their paws may be larger than a human hand or foot. The smallest species are the bobcat and the Canada lynx, while the largest is the Eurasian lynx, with considerable variations within species. Physical characteristics of Lynx species Species Sex Weight Length Height (standing at shoulders) Eurasian lynx males 18 to 30 kg (40 to 66 lb) 81 to 129 cm (32 to 51 in) .mw-parser-output .frac{white-space:nowrap}.mw-parser-output .frac .num,.mw-parser-output .frac .den{font-size:80%;line-height:0;vertical-align:super}.mw-parser-output .frac .den{vertical-align:sub}.mw-parser-output .sr-only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);height:1px;margin:-1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px}70 cm (27+1⁄2 in)[6] females 18 kg (40 lb) Canada lynx Both 8 to 14 kg (18 to 31 lb) 90 cm (35+1⁄2 in) 48 to 56 cm (19 to 22 in)[7] Iberian lynx males 12.9 kg (28 lb) 85 to 110 cm (33+1⁄2 to 43+1⁄2 in) 60 to 70 cm (23+1⁄2 to 27+1⁄2 in)[8][9] females 9.4 kg (20+3⁄4 lb) Bobcat males 7.3 to 14 kg (16 to 30+3⁄4 lb)[10] 71 to 100 cm (28 to 39+1⁄2 in)[10] 51 to 61 cm (20 to 24 in)[11] females 9.1 kg (20 lb) Species The four living species of the genus Lynx are believed to have evolved from Lynx issiodorensis, which lived in Europe and Africa during the late Pliocene to early Pleistocene. The Pliocene felid Felis rexroadensis from North America has been proposed as an even earlier ancestor; however, this was larger than any living species, and is not currently classified as a true lynx.[12][13]

I might be the only high schooler who still says the full “hello” every time I greet someone, rather than “hi” or “hey”. People rarely notice, or at worst I get a slightly strained smile, but for me, it’s a world of distinction. When I was fourteen, I started hearing voices and was later diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Auditory Hallucinations, a really fancy way of saying I hear voices when I’m anxious. I still remember the first time I realized they weren’t real. The bell had rung to move periods, and the stairwell was flush with middle schoolers sporting bulging backpacks. The reverberating quality of the space made the chatter—whether that Science test was today or tomorrow and what people thought of Avengers: Infinity War and if that one girl really had kissed the other guy—bounded throughout the stairs as its own sentient being. Still, I heard one of my friends behind me say, “Hey Sara!” I turned around, a smile preset on my face, but didn’t see him. Oh well; it was crowded, and the surge of kids kept pushing me further down. I would catch him in class. I descended the stairs and went to my class. In the hallway by the door, I spotted my friend and waved…but the wave faltered when I realized he was approaching me from the wrong direction. To have been behind me on the stairs, he should have been walking the same way as me, but he faced me coming into the class. Which meant he’d climbed down the other set of stairs. He hadn’t been on that stairwell at all. The voice I had heard float by my ears as my friend’s—it didn’t exist. It was inside my head. Without proper mental health, nothing else can flourish. The mind is the strongest organ we have, the one that holds all the rest in place. When it falters, so do sleep, mood, breathing--everything that keeps us alive and life worth living. I had my wake-up call on my mental health; through the onset of the voices, I learned I couldn't ignore all those strange little anxieties I experienced everyday that I used to push down deep inside. For me, the only way out was through. The biggest problem I've faced is that I cannot maintain mental wellness. Few of the things I do or say in an attempt to master my Anxiety do much good. Alone I cannot do it, only together. The frequency of the voices has decreased thanks to my amazing therapist and supportive friends, many of whom then told me their own stories on mental health. It is through them and for them that I've reestablished my place in the here and now. Together, I've found strategies that work to mitigate the voices and live the life I want to live. Together, I've remembered how to go out and greet the world.

At my writer’s group, you’ll never hear anyone clap after a reading. “Ok gang, find a good place to finish that last sentence,” our leader instructs from his spot in the front. We’re in the basement of the old church, the tables aligned in a rectangle with a few black chairs interspersed behind them. The steady clack of keyboards slowly comes to a pitter as people wrap up the last sentences of the free write prompt. I look down at my own computer, the brightness dimmed as low as possible to prevent anyone from reading over my shoulder. It’s alright, but it’s nothing special. That’s probably one of the reasons why we don’t clap. Clapping is for performances, for rewards, for people who practice hours and hours for their moment. Most of us here will never have a moment. We work just as hard, though, put in hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours, survive our day jobs just to enter our side performance, risk long nights and dozens of people shouting in a thousand ways “you’re not good enough” for the privilege of telling someone we’re writers. People think I'm crazy, but I've always taken that trade off. Our leader glances across the room, taking off his gray beret to run a hand through his hair. “Anyone got anything to share?” Ask a hundred writers why they write, and you’ll get a hundred different responses. I got into it because I needed an escape. Fantasy became my life. The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Golden Compass—I read them all, and dozens more besides. It’s no wonder why the first six novels I wrote followed in their footsteps. Eighth grade changed everything. I had some intense mental health issues that would last the better part of three years, which strangled every part of my life. That made me feel quite isolated, until I found a copy of Caroline Kaufman’s light filters in. I didn’t even really read poetry until that point, but that. Is. Poetry. Though Kaufman’s chapbook talks about dealing with depression, which I don't have, she managed to reach through the gap between my brain and hers and find the words I, someone she would never meet, needed to hear. Soon I found that I could no longer be satisfied with giving people an escape from their lives: I wanted to reach into those issues and help them through. That, I hope, will be my mark as a writer: an authenticity that can’t be denied. Something applause has never grasped. Our leader is still looking around, so I swallow, then raise my hand as if still in school. “I’ll go.” He smiles, giving a slight nod. “Alright Sara; go for it.” I swallow again, give the paragraphs one last run through in my head for any typos, then begin. I stumble over the very words I wrote, but the dialogue rolls off my tongue the way I imagined in my head. I have something here. Maybe not much. Certainly not perfection. But…something. There’s a slight pause when I finish, and I can’t help but grin. We may not have our moment, but we do have this. The snaps start as a soft clicking, then grow louder as more members join. Some snap under the table; some rock their arms into the movement. It swells in the basement of nowhere, from people of whom the world will never know their names. I lean back into the brisk pace of the beat and feel the words breathed into the thrum: we hear you; we are with you; this is our life.

Belay A day’s worth of rations in hand, I laced my boots and tightened my hold on my fifty-pound backpack. But I wasn’t climbing Mount Everest; I’d be conquering my high school’s library. Ever since a close call at my middle school, my Generalized Anxiety Disorder had turned the healthy caution of school shootings every American student has into an intense fear. The issue had escalated in 11th grade when I’d—kind of stupidly—decided on Columbine as my summer reading book for English. Within 432 pages, my high school’s library had turned from a place to check out books to a place to be shot. Of course, I couldn’t avoid the library forever. Beyond having lots of free novels for a self-proclaimed bookworm like me to devour, that was where I was scheduled to meet the student I would be tutoring in AP Psychology. I needed to get a hold on this before it overwhelmed me. Ten minutes. Give me ten minutes in there, and then you can leave, I thought to myself. With a deep breath, I crossed the threshold and went around the circular librarian’s table. In the middle of the space were a trail of desks with outlets wired between for the student laptops. I claimed the one on the end, in sight of the double door exit. The rest of the students inside had their notebooks out or laptops up, their hushed whispers lilting through the air. I gave a quick check of their backpacks; there didn’t seem to be any bombs. I was safe. I could do this. Seven more minutes. I pulled my laptop out of my bag. Booted it up. Powered it back down. Took out a pencil. Stared at it. Placed it on the formica desk. A sheen of sweat slicked my hands, so I rubbed them against my pants. I took a second glance around the room; save the thin librarian making her rounds, reminding the groups of kids to keep their voices down, nothing had changed. I’d been there for five minutes, and no one had drawn a gun. Still, my knee couldn’t stop bouncing against the seat. The moment ten minutes ticked by on the overhead clock, I grabbed my backpack and was out the door. When I think of courage, I always think of action movies: scaling mountains, wrestling the sea, dueling in the 19th century Wild West. It’s always big and daring and loud, in your face. That courage certainly exists, and it’s certainly needed. But there’s the other kind of courage, too, a quieter kind. I hadn’t saved the world that day; I hadn’t even cured my anxiety. Still, I went there and showed up, so that the next day, it could be thirty minutes, or an hour, or an afternoon. It’s the same kind of courage needed to voice my opinion against the majority, to critique a friend out of love when I know they won’t thank me, to admit to a boy, “I love you.” The everyday courage that tells me I’m more than my fears, to rise again, to keep going, until I eventually figure it out.

I might be the only high schooler who still says the full “hello” every time I greet someone, rather than “hi” or “hey”. People rarely notice, or at worst I get a slightly strained smile, but for me, it’s a world of distinction. When I was fourteen, I started hearing voices, and was later diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Auditory Hallucinations, a really fancy way of saying I hear voices when I’m anxious. I still remember the first time I realized they weren’t real: The bell had rung to move periods, and the stairwell was flush with middle schoolers sporting bulging backpacks. The reverberating quality of the space made the chatter—whether that Science test was today or tomorrow and what people thought of Avengers: Infinity War and if that one girl really had kissed the other guy—bounded throughout the stairs as its own sentient being. Still, I heard one of my friends behind me say, “Hey Sara!” I turned around, a smile preset on my face, but didn’t see him. Oh well; it was crowded, and the surge of kids kept pushing me further down. I would catch him in class. I descended the stairs and went to my class. In the hallway by the door, I spotted my friend and waved…but the wave faltered when I realized he was approaching me from the wrong direction. To have been behind me on the stairs, he should have been walking the same way as me, but he faced me coming into the class. Which meant he’d climbed down the other set of stairs. He hadn’t been on that stairwell at all. Heat knifed my chest as I understood the voice I had heard float by my ears as my friend’s—it didn’t exist. It was inside my head. I’ve come a long way since then, though I am starting to realize, as I think a lot of people with a mental illness soon do, that it isn’t something you necessarily overcome. All it takes is one ill-timed school shooter drill or a close call while driving to set my Anxiety off. But I can say, after two years of cognitive behavioral therapy and a year on an SSRI, that it is now a rare day when I hear a voice. It helps that every time I take courage to share my story, someone else knows they're not crazy--or at least they have an ally who's the same type of different. I'm a voice for everyone who's mental illness doesn't fit into the neat categories doctors have laid out for us and the people who used to consider themselves normal. Maybe that won't change the world, but it can save people. People who, when banded together, speak up for themselves and prove there's more in their heads than noise.

Six-year-old me twirls through the hallway, singing my screeches to the sky for all I’m worth. The green carpet cushions my bare feet, springing one step into the next in a fluid motion; I never stop in the same spot for more than a moment. I go around and around our small house, spilling into our living room. The wooden panels adorning the walls spin into a blur like watching the trees in a car racing down the highway. When my head starts to tumble up and down instead of just around and around, I finally collapse onto the scratchy couch, short giggles puffing through my gasps for breath. My vision clears, allowing me to finally take in the other occupant of the room. The big bay window sheds rectangles of sunlight onto the carpet in front of the box TV across from the couch. And in the furthermost square lays Sally, our Boxer/Akita mix. Her tawny coat makes her look like a little lioness, except for a heart-shaped face that’s a much darker brown and a tail that ends in a frayed point. Flecks of gray dot her muzzle. She’s six, like me; we’ve grown up together. I tilt my head, staring for a bit, then crawl over to her and scoot alongside her flank. Her short fur tickles my bare skin. I stick my mouth right next to her ear and coo, “Whatcha doing, Sally?” Couldn’t she see it was play time? Then I feel it: the warmth coating my pajamas, tinging my skin with the slightly burned smell of the outdoors. The sun tousles my knotted curls, and the carpet softens underneath my skinny arms. Sally meets my eyes and snorts, her dark brown ones passing secrets my teal ones can’t yet understand. Without meaning to, my breath matches her deep, even ones, and us two sisters lay there for a while in the sun, letting life swirl through us. That was a lesson I would have to relearn again and again, through taking AP classes and finding a job and starting a multitude of clubs at the same time, as ambition continues to overtax my resources. Humans aren’t meant to run at a resting speed of a thousand miles per hour; they’re meant to sit, to listen, to be. It’s in my nature to do too many things too fast; I know that. But then I must slow down and remember what my soul sister taught me: sometimes the spot in the sun is worth more anything else you miss by not racing around.

Gutter We went to the bowling alley on a Sunday afternoon. Two hours for $50—a steal for four people. My brother insisted his double strike was a fluke, but it only encouraged my dad for more and more outrageous throws. My mom and I were just happy when the blue streaked misfit didn’t glide off the edge. All around us were people having fun. Two lanes down the husband had to break out his crazy socks to disarm his wife’s spares. Three generations across had a father explain in Spanish to his hunched father which ball was which and what to do with them. He kept an arm around his teenage son, who alternated between checking his phone and spiraling the ball toward the pins. Behind us, a single mother and her son went rapid-fire through the frames. The eleven-year-old boy had a penchant for nine pins; whenever the ball swished right around the tenth, he took off his blue-rimmed glasses and mimed throwing them to the ground; it made his mother laugh. The blacklights pulsed underneath our faces, neon oranges and greens sucking the color off our haggard cheeks and onto the wall behind. Even as we bopped to the too-loud pop music, we knew it couldn’t last. The husband and wife would go back to their separate beds, wondering where their marriage had gone. The father would slip the chemo drip into his father’s frail arm, already considering when the three generations would become two. The single mother would close the door to her apartment behind her son and stare in the walkway mirror, waiting for that second set of arms to wrap around from behind the way they used to, the way they now never could. And my family and I would walk out of the bowling alley into the harsh sunlight, temples pulsing from the hiss of the ball hurling passed the painted arrows, knowing what it feels like to be a hollow pin waiting to topple.

Education saved my life. Simple as that. It was someone’s education who figured out the procedure to correct strabismus, and another surgeon’s education to perform it on me, so that this girl who should have been partially blind can get away with (arguably thick) glasses. It was an engineer’s education, and then a car manufacturer’s, that designed safer cars so that this former permit holder suffered no more than her dad’s exasperation when his car crashed into the curb. And it was a teacher’s education that brought her into the classroom to my third grade self and, without either of us realizing it at the time, set me on the path of pursuing teaching myself. When I walked into her classroom, I was so shy I had trouble starting conversations. But she pushed me and challenged me not just in my academics, but also in my way of thinking. By the end of that year, I hadn't just learned Math and Science but also how to listen, and how to be heard. That’s why I want to get a degree and become a teacher: to help the next generation understand what they've learned within the world's larger context. Chances are these students, once they graduate, won’t be articulating the symbolism of Gatsby’s green light; they will, however, be watching the news, and have to analyze both what’s said and isn’t said to come to a rounded conclusion of what occurred. They might not be crafting classical argument pieces about whether schools should implement an honor code system; they could, however, have to disagree with their parents’ beliefs in a professional and kind yet persuasive manner. They probably won’t devour twenty-five books by the end of the semester to achieve an A; they will, however, be required to consider others’ stories, lifestyles, and dreams--even if they differ from their own. And it’s my hope, like any educator, to have some small part in getting these future students to this point. Education is all around us. The refining and enhancing of a skill set is necessary to society. Education isn’t frivolous, or unnecessarily time-consuming, or brainwashing in disguise; it’s a vital part of life. My life included.

Breathe. It sounds like such a simple one, but it's the one I always forget. You've absolutely got this year. Don't overwork yourself trying to prove something. You have nothing to prove. Just go out there, get work done, of course, but remember to hang out with friends, play with your dog, do your hobbies, and put the pencil down once in a while. Like I said, this is one I struggle with. I'm taking four AP courses this year and will anticipate having up to five hours of homework a night once they get passed the first week. I, too, have to remind myself that sometimes it's better to not finish my homework in favor of my mental sanity. If I'm not functioning, nothing else I do will, either. While I technically have an Instagram because I'm on Facebook, I don't have a formal account. My Facebook is Sara Van Reymersdal.

You want thingamabobs? I've got twenty! But who cares? No big deal I want more I was a big Disney princess fan growing up (got the wallpaper and Cinderella dress to prove it), and Ariel always infatuated me. Who wouldn’t want to be a mermaid? I always thought we had a special connection, since we both had red hair and fish as friends. My Mom and I could sing the songs for hours. As I got older, however, the story of Ariel resonated in a different way. Here was a young woman “ready to stand” for her beliefs and ambitions. She pushed passed her father’s, Sebastian’s, and really the whole ocean’s expectations for her to pursue her dream of meeting humans. Ariel didn’t wait for someone else to tell her “when’s it [her] turn” to live her life the way she wanted to; she took agency by going to Ursula, despite it costing her voice. That’s the exact same thing I’m doing now, by writing this essay to earn scholarships to go to college. By doing so, I’m pursuing my own dreams and ambitions of becoming an English teacher. Even when it requires sacrifice, of time and money and health. Even when others’ expectations for me say that I’m “the girl who has everything”, that we need more women in STEM, that I should wait until I’m a little older before making any major decisions. For sure, I’m done waiting; I’m putting myself on the path for success now, not when someone else says it’s ok for me to start. I’m going to become a teacher, even if the rest of the world can’t understand why I’m not happy with my suburban life. If there’s one thing Ariel taught me, it’s this: achieve your dreams, especially if the rest of the world thinks you’re crazy. Despite the difficulties I know will come, I’m going to push to become part of that world of educators.

At my writer’s group, you’ll never hear anyone clap after a reading. “Ok gang, find a good place to finish that last sentence,” our leader instructs from his spot in the front. We’re in the basement of the old church, the tables aligned in a rectangle with a few black chairs interspersed behind them. The steady clack of keyboards slowly comes to a pitter as people wrap up the last sentences of the free write prompt. I look down at my own computer, the brightness dimmed as low as possible to prevent anyone from reading over my shoulder. It’s alright, but it’s nothing special. That’s probably one of the reasons why we don’t clap. Clapping is for performances, for rewards, for people who practice hours and hours for their moment. Most of us here will never have a moment. We work just as hard, though, put in hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours, survive our day jobs just to enter our side performance, risk long nights and dozens of people shouting in a thousand ways “you’re not good enough” for the privilege of telling someone we’re writers. People think I'm crazy, but I've always taken that trade off. Our leader glances across the room, taking off his gray beret to run a hand through his hair. “Anyone got anything to share?” Ask a hundred writers why they write, and you’ll get a hundred different responses. I got into it because I needed an escape. Fantasy became my life. The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Golden Compass—I read them all, and dozens more besides. It’s no wonder why the first six novels I wrote followed in their footsteps. Eighth grade changed everything. I had some intense mental health issues that would last the better part of three years, which strangled every part of my life. That made me feel quite isolated, until I found a copy of Caroline Kaufman’s light filters in. I didn’t even really read poetry until that point, but that. Is. Poetry. Though Kaufman’s chapbook talks about dealing with depression, which I don't have, she managed to reach through the gap between my brain and hers and find the words I, someone she would never meet, needed to hear. Soon I found that I could no longer be satisfied with giving people an escape from their lives: I wanted to reach into those issues and help them through. That, I hope, will be my mark as a writer: an authenticity that can’t be denied. Something applause has never grasped. Our leader is still looking around, so I swallow, then raise my hand as if still in school. “I’ll go.” He smiles, giving a slight nod. “Alright Sara; go for it.” I swallow again, give the paragraphs one last run through in my head for any typos, then begin. I stumble over the very words I wrote, but the dialogue rolls off my tongue the way I imagined in my head. I have something here. Maybe not much. Certainly not perfection. But…something. There’s a slight pause when I finish, and I can’t help but grin. We may not have our moment, but we do have this. The snaps start as a soft clicking, then grow louder as more members join. Some snap under the table; some rock their arms into the movement. It swells in the basement of nowhere, from people of whom the world will never know their names. I lean back into the brisk pace of the beat and feel the words breathed into the thrum: we hear you; we are with you; this is our life.

One of the greatest blessings in my life is that I’ve gone to public school for the past twelve years. By fourth grade, before anyone could inform us how bizarre this is in the world, this devout Roman Catholic shared snacks and stories with a Jew (more of an atheist in practice), a Muslim, and a Hindu at her lunch table. Of course we stepped on each other’s toes—I couldn’t understand why Burger King was such a strange place for someone who revered cows, and one of my friends once put two string cheeses together in the shape of a cross and called it “Cheesus”, which I found offensive—but I learned more about the meaning of faith from them than the entire religion unit in Social Studies. Through my diverse friends, I’ve come to understand that not all inside the church are good and not all outside the church are bad, and that regardless, all religions need to coexist. We know far more about our universe than we think we do. Every single person, all across the globe, from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich, black, white, red, yellow, rainbow, female, male, non-binary, Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian, and everyone in between contributes to the story of the world. How can we hope to find more answers in space or the past or the oceans before we look in the present moment, in our own backyard? We don’t need new technologies to understand how the universe works; we need to be able to sit down and listen to each other. If we don’t…well, we’ve seen where that ends up. The Crusades. The Spanish Inquisition. World wars. Panic. Discord. People screaming in each other’s faces until all that can be heard is noise, the actual words drowned in the roar. It’s psychology. In the early days of humans, anything unfamiliar was a threat, and anything seen before hadn’t killed us, at least not yet. We quickly learned to embrace the known and fear what we couldn’t yet understand. And for all our attempts in this new age to be refined, to remove the primitive, as a species we haven’t gotten past this basic instinct. There’s only one way to counteract that natural desire: to learn, and to keep learning, even when it’s uncomfortable, or unpopular, or just plain hard. Without an open mind and tolerance, leading us to a better understanding of the universe, we’re doomed to despise what we don’t comprehend.

Education saved my life. Simple as that. It was someone’s education who figured out the procedure to correct strabismus, and another surgeon’s education to perform it on me, so that this girl who should have been partially blind can get away with (arguably thick) glasses. It was a pharmacist’s education that condensed iron into a tablet, so I don’t get lightheaded, and a lab technician’s education that found the diminished iron in my blood in the first place. It was an engineer’s education, and then a car manufacturer’s, that designed safer cars so that this former permit holder suffered no more than her dad’s exasperation when his car crashed into the curb. And it was a teacher’s education that brought her into the classroom to my third grade self and, without either of us realizing it at the time, set me on the path of pursuing teaching myself. When I walked into her classroom, I was so shy I had trouble starting conversations. But she pushed me and challenged me not just in my academics, but also in my way of thinking. By the end of that year, I hadn't just learned Math and Science but also how to listen, and how to be heard. That’s why I want to pursue higher education and become a teacher: to help the next generation understand what they've learned within the world's larger context. Chances are these students, once they graduate, won’t be articulating the symbolism of Gatsby’s green light; they will, however, be watching the news, and have to analyze both what’s said and isn’t said to come to a rounded conclusion of what occurred. They might not be crafting classical argument pieces about whether schools should implement an honor code system; they could, however, have to disagree with their parents’ beliefs in a professional and kind yet persuasive manner. They probably won’t devour twenty-five books by the end of the semester to achieve an A; they will, however, be required to consider others’ stories, lifestyles, and dreams--even if they differ from their own. And it’s my hope, like any educator, to have some small part in getting these future students to this point. Education is all around us. The refining and enhancing of a skill set is necessary to society. Education isn’t frivolous, or unnecessarily time-consuming, or brainwashing in disguise; it’s a vital part of life. My life included.

At my writer’s group, you’ll never hear anyone clap after a reading. “Ok gang, find a good place to finish that last sentence,” our leader instructs from his spot in the front. We’re in the basement of the old church, the tables aligned in a rectangle with a few black chairs interspersed behind them. The steady clack of keyboards slowly comes to a pitter as people wrap up the last sentences of the free write prompt. I look down at my own computer, the brightness dimmed as low as possible to prevent anyone from reading over my shoulder. It’s alright, but it’s nothing special. That’s probably one of the reasons why we don’t clap. Clapping is for performances, for rewards, for people who practice hours and hours for their moment. Most of us here will never have a moment. We work just as hard, though, put in hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours, survive our day jobs just to enter our side performance, risk long nights and dozens of people shouting in a thousand ways “you’re not good enough” for the privilege of telling someone we’re writers. People think I'm crazy, but I've always taken that trade off. Our leader glances across the room, taking off his gray beret to run a hand through his hair. “Anyone got anything to share?” Ask a hundred writers why they write, and you’ll get a hundred different responses. I got into it because I needed an escape. Fantasy became my life. The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Golden Compass—I read them all, and dozens more besides. It’s no wonder why the first six novels I wrote followed in their footsteps. Eighth grade changed everything. I had some intense mental health issues that would last the better part of three years, which strangled every part of my life. That made me feel quite isolated, until I found a copy of Caroline Kaufman’s light filters in. I didn’t even really read poetry until that point, but that. Is. Poetry. Though Kaufman’s chapbook talks about dealing with depression, which I don't have, she managed to reach through the gap between my brain and hers and find the words I, someone she would never meet, needed to hear. Soon I found that I could no longer be satisfied with giving people an escape from their lives: I wanted to reach into those issues and help them through. That, I hope, will be my mark as a writer: an authenticity that can’t be denied. Something applause has never grasped. Our leader is still looking around, so I swallow, then raise my hand as if still in school. “I’ll go.” He smiles, giving a slight nod. “Alright Sara; go for it.” I swallow again, give the paragraphs one last run through in my head for any typos, then begin. I stumble over the very words I wrote, but the dialogue rolls off my tongue the way I imagined in my head. I have something here. Maybe not much. Certainly not perfection. But…something. There’s a slight pause when I finish, and I can’t help but grin. We may not have our moment, but we do have this. The snaps start as a soft clicking, then grow louder as more members join. Some snap under the table; some rock their arms into the movement. It swells in the basement of nowhere, from people of whom the world will never know their names. I lean back into the brisk pace of the beat and feel the words breathed into the thrum: we hear you; we are with you; this is our life.

Education saved my life. Simple as that. It was someone’s education who figured out the procedure to correct strabismus, and another surgeon’s education to perform it on me, so that this girl who should have been partially blind can get away with (arguably thick) glasses. It was a pharmacist’s education that condensed iron into a tablet, so I don’t get lightheaded, and a lab technician’s education that found the diminished iron in my blood in the first place. It was an engineer’s education, and then a car manufacturer’s, that designed safer cars so that this former permit holder suffered no more than her dad’s exasperation when his car crashed into the curb. And it was a teacher’s education that brought her into the classroom to my third grade self and, without either of us realizing it at the time, set me on the path of pursuing teaching myself. When I walked into her classroom, I was so shy I had trouble starting conversations. But she pushed me and challenged me not just in my academics, but also in my way of thinking. By the end of that year, I hadn't just learned Math and Science but also how to listen, and how to be heard. That’s why I want to get a degree and become a teacher: to help the next generation understand what they've learned within the world's larger context. Chances are these students, once they graduate, won’t be articulating the symbolism of Gatsby’s green light; they will, however, be watching the news, and have to analyze both what’s said and isn’t said to come to a rounded conclusion of what occurred. They might not be crafting classical argument pieces about whether schools should implement an honor code system; they could, however, have to disagree with their parents’ beliefs in a professional and kind yet persuasive manner. They probably won’t devour twenty-five books by the end of the semester to achieve an A; they will, however, be required to consider others’ stories, lifestyles, and dreams--even if they differ from their own. And it’s my hope, like any educator, to have some small part in getting these future students to this point. Education is all around us. The refining and enhancing of a skill set is necessary to society. Education isn’t frivolous, or unnecessarily time-consuming, or brainwashing in disguise; it’s a vital part of life. My life included.

Education saved my life. Simple as that. It was someone’s education who figured out the procedure to correct strabismus, and another surgeon’s education to perform it on me, so that this girl who should have been partially blind can get away with (arguably thick) glasses. It was a pharmacist’s education that condensed iron into a tablet, so I don’t get lightheaded, and a lab technician’s education that found the diminished iron in my blood in the first place. It was an engineer’s education, and then a car manufacturer’s, that designed safer cars so that this former permit holder suffered no more than her dad’s exasperation when his car crashed into the curb. And it was a teacher’s education that brought her into the classroom to my third grade self and, without either of us realizing it at the time, set me on the path of pursuing teaching myself. When I walked into her classroom, I was so shy I had trouble starting conversations. But she pushed me and challenged me not just in my academics, but also in my way of thinking. By the end of that year, I hadn't just learned Math and Science but also how to listen, and how to be heard. That’s why I want to become a teacher: to help the next generation understand what they've learned within the world's larger context. Chances are these students, once they graduate, won’t be articulating the symbolism of Gatsby’s green light; they will, however, be watching the news, and have to analyze both what’s said and isn’t said to come to a rounded conclusion of what occurred. They might not be crafting classical argument pieces about whether schools should implement an honor code system; they could, however, have to disagree with their parents’ beliefs in a professional and kind yet persuasive manner. They probably won’t devour twenty-five books by the end of the semester to achieve an A; they will, however, be required to consider others’ stories, lifestyles, and dreams--even if they differ from their own. And it’s my hope, like any educator, to have some small part in getting these future students to this point. Education is all around us. The refining and enhancing of a skill set is necessary to society. Education isn’t frivolous, or unnecessarily time-consuming, or brainwashing in disguise; it’s a vital part of life. My life included.

A day’s worth of rations in hand, I laced my boots and tightened my hold on my fifty-pound backpack. But I wasn’t climbing Mount Everest; I’d be conquering my high school’s library. Ever since a close call at my middle school, my Generalized Anxiety Disorder had turned the healthy caution of school shootings every American student has into an intense fear. The issue had escalated in 11th grade when I’d—kind of stupidly—decided on Columbine as my summer reading book for English. Within 432 pages, my high school’s library had turned from a place to check out books to a place to be shot. Of course, I couldn’t avoid the library forever. Beyond having lots of free novels for a self-proclaimed bookworm like me to devour, that was where I was scheduled to meet the student I would be tutoring in AP Psychology. I needed to get a hold on this before it overwhelmed me. Ten minutes. Give me ten minutes in there, and then you can leave, I thought to myself. With a deep breath, I crossed the threshold and went around the circular librarian’s table. In the middle of the space were a trail of desks with outlets wired between for the student laptops. I claimed the one on the end, in sight of the double door exit. The rest of the students inside had their notebooks out or laptops up, their hushed whispers lilting through the air. I gave a quick check of their backpacks; there didn’t seem to be any bombs. I was safe. I could do this. Seven more minutes. I pulled my laptop out of my bag. Booted it up. Powered it back down. Took out a pencil. Stared at it. Placed it on the formican desk. A sheen of sweat slicked my hands, so I rubbed them against my pants. I took a second glance around the room; save the thin librarian making her rounds, reminding the groups of kids to keep their voices down, nothing had changed. I’d been there for five minutes, and no one had drawn a gun. Still, my knee couldn’t stop bouncing against the seat. The moment ten minutes ticked by on the overhead clock, I grabbed my backpack and was out the door. I never used to like to talk about my anxiety because it didn't have a happy ending. People close to me are always looking for that last line, "But I'm fine now," the words I can never give. Anxiety and I are stuck together, however much we abhor it. But I refuse to simply coexist, to not fight back, even when on the outside it may look like I'm not fighting at all. I refused to let anxiety keep me out of the library. I refuse to let anxiety keep me from driving. I refuse to let anxiety keep me from becoming a teacher. I refuse to let anxiety keep me on the sidelines of my own life.

A day’s worth of rations in hand, I laced my boots and tightened my hold on my fifty-pound backpack. But I wasn’t climbing Mount Everest; I’d be conquering my high school’s library. Ever since a close call at my middle school, my Generalized Anxiety Disorder had turned the healthy caution of school shootings every American student has into an intense fear. The issue had escalated in 11th grade when I’d—kind of stupidly—decided on Columbine as my summer reading book for English. Within 432 pages, my high school’s library had turned from a place to check out books to a place to be shot. Of course, I couldn’t avoid the library forever. Beyond having lots of free novels for a self-proclaimed bookworm like me to devour, that was where I was scheduled to meet the student I would be tutoring in AP Psychology. I needed to get a hold on this before it overwhelmed me. Ten minutes. Give me ten minutes in there, and then you can leave, I thought to myself. With a deep breath, I crossed the threshold and went around the circular librarian’s table. In the middle of the space were a trail of desks with outlets wired between for the student laptops. I claimed the one on the end, in sight of the double door exit. The rest of the students inside had their notebooks out or laptops up, their hushed whispers lilting through the air. I gave a quick check of their backpacks; there didn’t seem to be any bombs. I was safe. I could do this. Seven more minutes. I pulled my laptop out of my bag. Booted it up. Powered it back down. Took out a pencil. Stared at it. Placed it on the formican desk. A sheen of sweat slicked my hands, so I rubbed them against my pants. I took a second glance around the room; save the thin librarian making her rounds, reminding the groups of kids to keep their voices down, nothing had changed. I’d been there for five minutes, and no one had drawn a gun. Still, my knee couldn’t stop bouncing against the seat. The moment ten minutes ticked by on the overhead clock, I grabbed my backpack and was out the door. I never used to like to talk about my anxiety because it didn't have a happy ending. People close to me are always looking for that last line, "But I'm fine now," the words I can never give. Anxiety and I are stuck together, however much we abhor it. But I refuse to simply coexist, to not fight back, even when on the outside it may look like I'm not fighting at all. I refused to let anxiety keep me out of the library. I refuse to let anxiety keep me from driving. I refuse to let anxiety keep me from becoming a teacher. I refuse to let anxiety keep me on the sidelines of my own life.

I might be the only high schooler who still says the full “hello” every time I greet someone, rather than “hi” or “hey”. People rarely notice, or at worst I get a slightly strained smile, but for me, it’s a world of distinction. When I was fourteen, I started hearing voices, and was later diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder with Auditory Hallucinations, a really fancy way of saying I hear voices when I’m anxious. I still remember the first time I realized they weren’t real. The bell had rung to move periods, and the stairwell was flush with middle schoolers sporting bulging backpacks. The reverberating quality of the space made the chatter—whether that Science test was today or tomorrow and what people thought of Avengers: Infinity War and if that one girl really had kissed the other guy—bounded throughout the stairs as its own sentient being. Still, I heard one of my friends behind me say, “Hey Sara!” I turned around, a smile preset on my face, but didn’t see him. Oh well; it was crowded, and the surge of kids kept pushing me further down. I would catch him in class. I descended the stairs and went to my class. In the hallway by the door, I spotted my friend and waved…but the wave faltered when I realized he was approaching me from the wrong direction. To have been behind me on the stairs, he should have been walking the same way as me, but he faced me coming into the class. Which meant he’d climbed down the other set of stairs. He hadn’t been on that stairwell at all. The voice I had heard float by my ears as my friend’s—it didn’t exist. It was inside my head. I’ve come a long way since then, though I am starting to realize, as I think a lot of people with a mental illness soon do, that it isn’t something you necessarily overcome. All it takes is one ill-timed school shooter drill or a close call while driving to set my Generalized Anxiety Disorder off. But I can say, after two years of cognitive-behavioral therapy and a year on an SSRI, that it is now a rare day when I hear a voice. Even if I do, anymore I’m lucky enough to have the tools needed to tackle them, ensuring that they will never be as bad as they once were. Once again, my reality and the world’s are one and the same. And I’m grateful.