Most of my English came from movies; most of my expectations came from nowhere in particular. The first month in Maryland was mostly listening. At school, in stores, on the bus.
I learned that "y'all" is one word. That grocery carts are heavier than they look. That there is no graceful way to ask someone to repeat themselves twice.
Two years in, I’m still listening. But I’m asking questions now.
I think I was thirteen, watching my grandmother count out her pills, sorting them into Sunday-through-Saturday compartments. There was something I couldn’t put into words then about how a single small thing — the right molecule, at the right time — could change a whole day for a whole person.
That’s still where I begin.
I’m not going to pretend it’s a clean line from there to here. Mostly it’s been a lot of late nights with biology textbooks, a lot of YouTube rabbit holes about the heart, a lot of half-finished notebooks.
But the shape of the interest hasn’t changed. Science that ends at a person. That’s the whole thing.
Saturday nights at a banquet hall — weddings, mostly. Retail floors when there are shifts.
I started because I wanted to help at home. I kept going because it turned out I liked the kind of attention work demands. There is no daydreaming when twelve plates need to leave the kitchen in the next four minutes.
Banquet work taught me my English faster than any class did. There is no choice when an order is wrong. You fix it, smile, and move.
I think a lot about doctors and engineers I’ve read about, the way calm under pressure is itself a learned skill.
The plan, if I have to call it that:
Read a lot. Learn how to ask better questions of professors I haven’t met yet. Get into a research lab the summer after junior year. Try to make every year feel less like coasting than the last one.
I don’t have a tidy ending for this page. That’s on purpose.
I’ll add to it as I go.