Communication wasn't always my forté. To be fair, everyone starts out with subpar communication skills. People usually take about a year after birth before they begin figuring out the process of effectively articulating their thoughts and emotions. By the time kids are in preschool, they may as well have a PhD in Talking with a concentration in Asking Questions. But I couldn’t speak a sentence until I was four years old. My story starts at birth. Pretty cliché, I...

I used to have serious issues with confidence and self-esteem. The world outside my personal bubble was intimidating, and I didn't know how to handle it. I was emotional and introverted through middle school, morbidly afraid that I would mess up and that my peers wouldn't like me. I had trouble making friends, and I was just plain lonely. My life completely changed when I was a teenager. After middle school, I went to an arts camp and a new...

Many of my friends define their lifetime goals in terms of their future careers. They want to be doctors and scientists, artists and teachers. These guys know what they want to “do”. Let me be honest for a moment. I’m seventeen years old. I’m just a high school student, and I don’t know what I want to "do". Maybe my fate ends with me becoming a filmmaker, or a journalist, or an actor, or anything else, but...

She looks up at the stars, lying beside me on the wet asphalt. She looks up at the stars and she thinks about the bigness and the far-awayness of outer space. Everything is so big, everything is so far away, and she is so small. She ponders her own insignificance. She panics and realizes that she doesn't mean anything. She will never mean anything, and she feels that she should be important, and why doesn't she mean anything and oh...