“My sister Cailyn is transgender, and it’s hard knowing that she’s going to grow up in a very judgmental society, and she’s not going to be seen as what she wants to be seen as, which is normal. She’s always going to be judged for that.”
Junior Emily Poundstone
“When I found out about my surgery, it wasn’t a decision I got the opportunity to make. It was more of like I did it, or in six months I could lose my hearing. I had to do it. People kept on asking for second opinions. I really didn’t need any. I went to the best I could, the University of Washington. I was scared, and nervous, but it didn’t hit me immediately. It didn’t really hit me until a couple of hours later when my grandma started talking to me about it. I started crying because, if anything goes wrong, a side of my face could become paralyzed, or I could lose my hearing indefinitely. Or if it doesn’t work I’ll have to have more surgeries in the future. I could die from it, but it’s a surgery that I have to have. So it’s nerve-wracking, but I know that I need to have it done. Right now I’m living the most I can with the hearing that I have, until I get the surgery. No matter what happens I’m still going to live, and I’m still going to try my best to do what I can, while I still can.”
Sophomore Nina Liebner
"My dad tells the worst jokes, but they are so bad that they always make me laugh. My mom always looks at the two of us like we're insane, as we sit there, barely breathing, cracking up at his terrible jokes."
Senior Sydney Donahoe
"I like to go to warm beaches and just lay there in the sun because they help me to forget about all the stress of real life."
Freshman Nikki Schobert
"It was the winter and I was staying at my grandma's house. We decided to go sledding down a steep hill outside. I woke up on the couch. My grandma told me I had run head first into a tree. There was a giant bump on my head and I could have gotten a concussion. I was lucky I didn't."
Senior Andrew Bernstein
“Ever since I was about seven and a half, close to eight years old, my dad’s been really abusive. It kind of went throughout a period of seven years. Then I was diagnosed with PTSD and anxiety. That’s a lot of stuff I have to deal with, because sometimes things that I notice people do end up triggering something that happened in the past. It kind of sets off emotions. With people that have PTSD, it’s really difficult to know what emotions going to come out, because they all just kind of crash together at once. It’s a hodge-podge of what’s going on with you. So you really don’t know what the person's going to do when they have that mental breakdown. So that’s something that I have to constantly think about. Say someone starts yelling, and then all of a sudden a flashback happens of my dad yelling at me, and then all of a sudden I’m cowering under a table. And that has happened before. My friends just look at me like ‘what’s going on with you’ or ‘what is wrong with you.’ Then I just start rocking back and forth, and I just have this weird, intense fear. Then all of a sudden I snap out of it, and it’s like, what’s going on?”
Sophomore Kantapong Patcharanu
“[Moving here from Thailand] was totally hard. I came here for four days, I didn’t know how to speak English, I didn’t know what to say, and I had to go to middle school. I felt really scared, it was really hard, and I was afraid. But I didn’t know that the first day that I passed through the doors, it would be really fun. I didn’t understand a single word that people [spoke], but I really enjoyed [going to] class, and I didn’t even know what that class was [teaching]. Everything is different, but great. I can’t explain how glad I am.”
Junior Grace Fortson
“I don’t know what I want to do, which is really hard, with college applications coming up, and trying to figure out which college I want to go to, and what I want to major in. Should I do something in science, or should I focus on music? It’s a lot to think about.”
Freshman Alex Ridenour
"My brother came into the hospital lounge with tears in his eyes saying, "It's a beautiful baby girl." That's when my niece was born."