From Third-Person to First-Person by Paisley

From Third-Person to First-Person by Paisley - August 2024 Scholarship Essay

We learn to be embarrassed at around three years old. Once we start to process the societal expectations that we are supposed to live up to, we begin to develop our self-conscious emotions like jealousy, empathy, and embarrassment. These are different from our primary emotions, such as fear, anger, and joy, in that they require us to think and to evaluate the way we live our lives. In doing this, some of us find ourselves stepping back and viewing our own lives in the third-person.
My own feelings of embarrassment cemented themselves into the framework of my mind quite easily. Like many young children, my first dream career was to be an actress. Sometime during my initial years in a school setting, this changed. I learned what it felt like to take up space, and I hated it. I hated the attention, the ever-present eyes, and the judgment that I could feel enveloping me. My dream career then shifted to being a writer. I figured that writing would still give me the opportunity to have an impact on others like being an actress would, but I would also be allowed the anonymity of never having to be seen and the ability to hide behind my pen. When I learned that writing is subjective to each individual and that someone would always hate whatever I created, my dream career shifted again. I fell in love with math and the beauty I found in its objective truth. Math only has one right answer, and you either know what you’re doing and love it, or you don’t. I am the former. This discovery was one of the main factors that led to my current choice of career: engineering.
As I learned to become more self aware of the pressure I was putting on myself and realized that being embarrassed is so inconsequential, I refound my love for creativity, which played a large part in my choice of engineering. I opened up doors in my mind that I had previously shut, and was able to redesign my creative paths to allow them front-row access to my life’s decisions. I allowed myself to think in new ways and to let all of these influence how I lived my life.
I’ve spent most of my life viewing myself in third-person and trying to anticipate what other people would think of me and my actions, but I am learning that letting go of all of that and being proud of the space I take up is all that I can do to really, truly, live.
While I haven’t always been the most outspoken or outgoing person, in recent years I’ve stepped into more leadership roles within my community and worked to help those around me.
In middle school I participated in small fundraisers at my school and did Relay-for-Life with my friends, but in high school I started taking leadership roles in these activities. I applied for LA Metro’s first Youth Council and their Transportation Career Academy Program internship, and was given a spot with each program.
The Youth Council was the first thing that really introduced me to engaging with communities to offer support and give them a voice. We covered areas stretching from South Bay to North LA, and the Westside Cities to the San Gabriel Valley, doing our best to establish ourselves so that the next Councils would already have a framework to work with.
We worked to take concerns from all communities within this region, and to use the feedback we received to help improve the entirety of LA Metro. The goal of the Council was to simultaneously grow the members’ engagement skills and to improve the functionality of the Metro with the feedback of both the youth, and the many cultures that make up the metropolitan city of Los Angeles.
With my future career I hope to use my previous experience and dedicate my work to helping improve the lives of others.