Hello and welcome to my hot mess of a life where I’m somehow always thriving and dying all at once.

As a senior at Naperville North, I rarely have any free time. But when I do, I spend it wisely. Usually it consists of binge-watching Parks and Recreation, Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries, Jane the Virgin, Dynasty, or Bones on Netflix. I am a huge couch potato and have an unhealthy obsession with watching drama and gossip without actually having to be apart of it. The couch is where I spend a large amount of my time bonding and snuggling with my puppy Cody. When the weather’s nice, we’ll go walking together for an hour or two. Either way, he’s always by my side (which is definitely why I’m his favorite).

Unfortunately, I usually don’t have a lot of time to do this. As much I love sitting around and doing nothing, I also love getting involved and being active (it’s almost as if I’m that guy from the movie Split who has multiple personalities). For the past four years I’ve been on the tennis team, which I absolutely love. There’s something so therapeutic about being able to smash a ball as hard as you can after a long day at school. As captain, I get to control a lot of what we do, including making sure everyone dresses up for Fun Friday’s (picture from the Frat Boy theme on the side) but it also means I have to answer 129389857 texts from parents each day asking me the smallest and dumbest questions. Oh well, I guess it’s important to start learning how to deal with annoying, micro-managing people now. Life skills right?

I am also a volunteer at Edward’s Hospital, the leader of the girl empowerment club and a member of the teen advisory board at the Alive center, co-captain of the Mock Trial Law Team, soccer referee for the Naperville Park District, and a peer tutor.

You might be wondering how I manage all that while staying sane. The easy answer is I don’t. My coping mechanisms to the constant stress are eating Ben and Jerry’s The Tonight Dough ice cream (slightly pricey but 11/10 would still recommend) and sleeping whenever I can squeeze that in.

While I may not always know what’s going on in my life right now, I am very content that I know what I want to do with the rest of my life. My plan is to become a pediatric nurse practitioner so that I can live each day of my life knowing that I am making a difference in the world. When I was young, my family always taught me that we had an obligation to help others and that above all it is important to be kind. These are the values that I try to live by every single day. My tennis coach and spanish teacher Señora Bishop is one of the kindest people I have ever met. She is my role model for who I am trying to be like in the future: compassionate, genuine, resilient, and hard working.

My life is absolutely crazy. I have no free time. I’m still trying to figure out exactly who I am. But I know that everything always works out in the end, even if it’s in a different way than we thought it would.

Welcome along for the ride, I promise you it’ll be an interesting one.