About Me!

Where most families hang school pictures, tests with the coveted “A” written in the corner, or holiday cards listing the children’s achievements from that year, my fridge at home is plastered with the 59% I received on my first AP Chemistry test and the time my mom forgot to pick my sister up from play practice. We call it “The Failure Wall,” and every time someone in my family makes a mistake, that usually seems colossal at the time, the person writes it on a Sticky-Note and attaches it to the side of the fridge.

Being raised in the type of family who embraces your flops as well as your successes has come with its drawbacks. At thirteen, although I was considered an adult in the Jewish community, I was not yet viewed as one by the rest of the world, so when my parents announced that we were going to embark on a trip from Nashville, Tennessee to Florida in a cramped, definitely not built for five people RV, I had no choice but to go along with it and restrain my complaints to only once every hour. As I laid in the cubby hole above the driver’s seat that had been deemed my bed, I wondered why my parents had subjected us to such torture and what I had done to deserve it. But my inconsolable misery during our infamous RV trip somehow turned into a joke over time, so that my family thought it was okay to continue to push me to try new things. I have been dragged to some extravagantly boring museums, been tricked into eating salmon that my mom told me was chicken, and was practically forced by my mom to approach my high school fiction writing teacher, whose class I loved, and ask her to supervise me in an independent study for the following semester.  

After that last push developed into a love of writing and the pursuit of a creative writing minor that I never thought I would be able to do, I started to come to the realization that perhaps my parents’ outlook on life was something that I could get on board with. I became motivated to accomplish things I never thought would be possible, like my dream of being able to do a split. Although I had quit gymnastics and dance in the first grade because I told my mom that they were “too pretty,” I have always wanted to do a split, mostly just to be able to say I could do one or perhaps to use it as a cool party trick. I practiced every day, following the instructions of middle school girls on YouTube who hadn’t yet hit the stage of puberty where women’s thighs and hips expand and therefore need more coaxing to lower flat to the floor. With two months of trying, I think I lowered myself about two inches closer to the ground, and then I deemed that as a good attempt and moved on with my life. But I had tried, and I was satisfied with that.

Over the past year, college has placed me in an environment that is conducive to trying new things, as it has classes and clubs concerning practically any subject or issue imaginable. However, at such a competitive institution, most students feel the pressure to not make mistakes, because we have always thought that in academics we simply can’t fail or we are shaped to despise it. I have faced the difficulty of finding a balance, challenging myself and reaching out of my comfort zone while still maintaining my academics, which have always been important to me. To solve this issue, I create instances that celebrate creativity and making mistakes, and sometimes will inevitably end in failure, to give my brain a break from the fact-based information of the classes related to my neuroscience and psychology majors that do not leave room for errors. This is what I have found in creative writing, which encourages editing and re-editing, taking risks, and failing, just to start again and model the story from a different point of view or with one less character. This past semester, I wrote a twenty-page story that I was really proud of, and brought it to my fiction workshop, during which it was completely and aggressively critiqued from beginning to end. I changed basically the entire plot, and combed through and edited each and every line I had written. When it was finished, I was thrilled because I had put everything I had into it, even though I knew there would definitely be many more versions in the future.

The importance of trying new things and making mistakes that has been instilled in me by my parents has shaped me into the confident, quirky, and driven person I am today. I am not satisfied unless I have a challenge, something that I can strive for or that takes me out of my comfort zone. Whether it is learning how to play the ukulele over December break, taking an art history class, or fiction writing, I have found that having a creative outlet where one is encouraged, and is even supposed to fail sometimes, is so important for maintaining a happy and healthy lifestyle in an environment like Vanderbilt, where it occasionally seems like a mistake will have implications much more severe than a Sticky-Note on a wall.