Born in the Eastside of Las Vegas, I was raised with a love of stories. My father was a high school dropout whose greatest academic achievement was obtaining his GED. My mother never made it past her junior year, instead choosing to start her own business in Los Angeles. She eventually left that business behind to marry my father, a banquet server who wanted nothing more than to provide for my family. She took a job as a secretary at her brother-in-law’s company, something she could’ve used to her advantage but didn’t, and they had my brother. Three years later, they had me, a baby three weeks overdue who came into the world with fluid in his lungs, forcing me to spend the first hours of my life in the ICU.

We were poor, but we had each other. My dad worked the graveyard shifts in order to watch me while my mom clocked in hours at the office. For the first few years, it was usually just him and I riding our bike all over North Las Vegas, which at the time was hardly the picture of a safe community. On those bike rides, I would talk for hours on end, asking questions about the world and making up stories that barely made a lick of sense at all. But my father would listen and answer and encourage me nonetheless. His father had been an alcoholic and died from cirrhosis when my dad was sixteen, and so he resolved to be painfully present in his sons’ life. At the time he was just listening to the nigh-incoherent ramblings of a toddler, but soon, the effect his parenting had on me would become evident.

I can’t quite pinpoint the exact moment I began telling stories. But throughout my childhood, I was always doing something to tell a tale or create a world of my own. I was the supreme leader of playtime, and if one of my friends tried to move the plot in a direction that didn’t make sense, I would demand that we go back and tell a “better” story. But that’s as far as my authorship went for a long time, save for the occasional writing assignment in elementary school that I adored. Those days, I was convinced that I was going to be a doctor or a chef or (much to my father’s horror) a construction worker.

The first time I sat down to write a genuine story was my first year of middle school. After reading The Fifth Wave, I had a dream that my friends and I had holed ourselves up in a mansion after an alien/plague hybrid removed all adults from the world. That was the exact moment everything changed for me. I sat down and typed out the entire story, coming back with a ten-thousand word incoherent mess I dubbed The Lone Child. It wasn’t good by any metric, but it was ten-thousand words— quite a bit for a middle schooler. My mom made sense of the story, and, realizing that I had something to say, found the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition, urging me to submit the novel. I won a Silver Key that first year, and all at once, I knew that, regardless of wherever the universe took me from there I was a storyteller, and I was always going to be a storyteller.

Mr. Senton’s Homecoming. Up on the Catwalk. Go Knights Go. Something in the Way. Euler’s Identity: The Pinnacle of Human Existentialism. Jeremy. Pool Full of Liquor. Naked City. No matter the genre, no matter the medium, no matter the intention, these are all stories I crafted from the crevices of my brain and put to paper. Those audio clips are nothing more than tiny jokes and tales I want to shared with listeners. Those video projects were made to give the viewer a glimpse into the stuttering, comedic story that exists in my life. And now, after years of growing my love for the artwork, it’s time I begin to tell the most important story I ever could: the story of the world.

I’ve collected all the skills I need to enter the world of journalism. I’ve familiarized myself with writing, producing, and reporting. I’ve found stories that I feel are worth telling. With a past full of lessons and a future full of dreams, it is now my time to take the step into my next great adventure, and tell stories that touch people’s lives, and make the world just a little bit less scary.