There’s a journal in my bedside drawer. If you opened it, you’d see a bunch of scribbled dates and sentences, written in the most disorganized, illegible way. If you read it, you’d probably wind up more confused than before. But it’s my proudest work.
That’s where it all began. Lying in my bed on some sleepless night my sophomore year when the darkness in which I closed my eyes left an unignorable ringing in my ears. I turned to the side and twisted the knob on my lamp three times.
Upon the third click, the darkness vanished, and I grabbed that empty notebook, buried away in the drawer and my mind. There wasn’t a conscious thought in my brain, only an instinct to write.
There’s a soothing feeling that comes with the lead of my pencil streaking a page or my fingers running across the keyboard. It’s an avenue for me to try to reflect and express all that my words can’t.
As I look back on my time here, I think of that little journal and this mission to describe the indescribable. Scarcely can I completely recall a good or bad memory from this place in detail; it’s like a panorama that lost a few frames. And I think it’s meant to be that way.
Days stack upon one another, and that time is not something that feels temporary. Yet now I stand at the end of my time here. I’ve started to wonder what my past seven years at St. Mark’s have amounted to. During Marksmen Ball, I read a letter I wrote to myself back in 8th grade. I paused at the final line.
“Are you proud of yourself?”
If anyone else asked me that question, I probably wouldn’t give it much thought. I’d nod and say yes. But the one person in the world I can’t lie to is myself. Now, what matters to me has changed over the years. So in answering this question, I wrote. As I passed by my old entries, I saw an image of myself finding definition. Each entry exists because of a moment that mattered; each one reflects a distortion of who I am. Yet flipping through the pages, I flipped through time, and I saw myself with increasing clarity.
Every snapshot of my life has a consistent theme: the support of those around me. I’ve watched my mother uproot her life for my uncle’s wellbeing. I have felt my father’s endless support. I have been shaped by teachers, coaches, friends and the people who fill this campus.
There’s a strange truth in the fact that what people notice about you can become part of who you are. The eyes with which I see myself are not entirely my own. After seven years at this school, hundreds of hours in this journalism suite, countless conversations, friendships and memories, I understand that I cannot describe myself without describing my community.
On April 30, 2025, I wrote one line in my notebook that has guided me since:
“Honor your last name.”
I want to do more than that. I want to honor everyone who has served me, so that I may serve them as well. I still cannot fully describe this feeling or why I feel so compelled to answer it. But maybe that is why I write. I write to make sense of what I cannot say. I write to tell the stories of the people who have impacted me. And I write with the hope that those stories might leave even a small impact behind.
