Growing up I never had to discover anything by myself. I was always told who to be, what to do and what to believe in. Everything about me was determined by my surroundings and other people. For example, I would come home from school everyday to find open Bibles and molded candles depicting religiously important figures strewn across all of the countertops in the kitchen. When I was young, Christianity was quickly ingrained in my mind, but now that I have grown, I have also matured and have begun to question who I really could be. I no longer follow the path created by others; I have become my own person. I now know what I am.

I am an artist.

Art is what I have used to find out new things about myself and it is also what I use to express who I am to everyone around me. I use my poems, stories and music to tell the world about myself; my drawings, paintings and outfits are to show who I’ve become. My art comes from the depths of who I am. Every piece I produce is a part of myself represented in paint, words and half-notes.

I have always been artistic. When I was very young it all started with drawings. Whenever I could get my hands on paper and a pencil I would sketch and doodle, never knowing what exactly I was making until after it was completed. I later moved on to writing however, and I commenced expressing myself with poems and stories. Ink and words became my allies as I chased new heights and strove for improvement. I am never content with being “good enough”; I need to be the best. My pursuit of perfection led me to music, and I learned all I could about piano and guitar. My journey through art has taught me much,including the fact that good art is not easy to create. You have to suffer for art, and let all the emotion of your past come through in what you do.

For me, that emotion is the remembrance of what I once had. As a child, I lived in that house. The kind of house that people dream of. It was the big house at the end of the street, back in my old neighborhood in Chicago. My family and I had a huge pool, a jacuzzi, a television in our bathroom and a beautiful kitchen; amenities we can no longer afford. During every holiday, our’s was the house soaked in light, the glow of thousands of bulbs illuminating the grandeur we lived in. I was the king, living in my high castle.Now, I have fallen into a simpler way of life. When I was eight we moved into a small apartment here in Antioch. My lifestyle was shattered and the world I once knew was blown to pieces. It was supposed to be a temporary move, but now it feels permanent. The luxury of my past still fills my mind at night, bringing me dreams in which I return to what I once knew. I want to get back to that lifestyle, whatever it takes.

Even though I am constantly striving to get back to the splendor I once knew, my family doesn’t always feel the same way. My older brother, for example, has not put in much effort to better his life. While most people look up to their older siblings, for me that is very hard to do. He is a high school dropout with kids, living in a perpetual state of financial turmoil. He is everything I don’t want to be and his lack of success has resulted in a strained relationship between the two of us. When we were growing up together my brother was always jealous of me; he saw me as the favorite child. However, I viewed him in the same light and always thought that he was truly the favorite child. We fought very frequently because of this, and now our relationship is nearly non-existent. The fighting in our childhood was one of the many factors that eventually led him down a bad path in which he got in a lot of trouble, ruined his own academic career and in turn, ruined his chances for financial stability. I do not want to follow the road he has paved. I want to be better. Even if he has not regained what we once knew, I still believe that I can.

I want my art to make me known and take me back to the luxury of my youth, but I know that the chances of me making it as an artist are very low. In a perfect world, all I would have to do to be financially secure in the future is continue to create and express myself, but this is not a perfect world. Realistically, I need to have a career to fall back upon for when my art fails. I see engineering as a way to continue creating things while also making money and I want that for my future. My plan is to educate myself as well as I can so that I can be successful. Nothing in my life seems to be coming together right now though, so I am not confident that my plans will fall together the way I want them to. All I can do is hope, fight for my future and earn my success by any means necessary.