This portion of my life starts in the Summer of 2005. I had a lot of free time when I was seven, considering all I had on my plate was finger painting and eating Cheez-Its. One day, when my sisters and their friends were in their room talking about boys and mascara, I went on an adventure in my house looking for something to do, but nothing intrigued me. Then, all of a sudden, I came across my mom's movie collection. Every movie looked boring and dusty, and then all of a sudden I saw this movie that would change my life forever. Sorry for the dramatics. I'm kind of extra.

On the cover, there was this girl who was laying down on her bed, and a badly burned man hovering over her head with sharp knives for hands. I was completely confused by the cover, but I just couldn’t let myself go on with my life if I didn’t watch it. I popped it into the DVD player, and then in bold letters, “A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET,” popped up on the screen. I was petrified and wanted to turn it off, but I never did. A young gorgeous Johnny Depp gets sucked into a bed, a blonde girl gets tossed around her room, and a mysterious grungy guy gets killed in his jail cell. This all happens in their dreams, and the perpetrator is a burnt man seeking revenge on the children of the parents who burned him, as a result of him being a psycho child murderer. I watched that movie from start to finish, and let it change me for good.

I know that it's weird for a seven-year-old girl to have been captivated by such a terrifying movie, but I was! I loved the storyline, and the plot, and the intensity, and the jump scares, and the characters. I loved this movie. I told my mom I watched it, and of course, she freaked out and asked me if I was okay, and I assured her I was fine. I was more than fine, I wanted to watch it again. I watched the second one, then the third one, and all the rest after that. And then, it progressed to me watching just about all horror movies known to man.

I was excited when I watched scary movies and fascinated by the monsters and ghouls that were within them. I liked to be shocked, and scared. It was a rush, especially for seven-year-old Brashana. My dad was also really into scary movies. Whenever I went over to his house, time was filled with watching horror films. High budget ones, low budget ones, extremely low budget ones, no budget ones. It was an eye-opening portion of my life, and possibly one of the oddest and awkward ones.

I got into FX makeup from watching scary movies. I remember begging my mom for makeup kits, and prosthetics. Every night I would give myself a full face makeup transformation. I would turn myself into vampires, and zombies, or princesses or fairies, or even vampire princess and zombie fairies. I was terrible at it, but I kept on practicing and practicing, and then I got pretty good. I was getting into advanced makeup and started practicing makeup on other people. It was such a life-changing experience. The highlight of this time was when I turned myself into Freddy Krueger. It was so rewarding and extremely weird to have transformed myself into the man who kicked off my obsession for horror films.

This portion of the year I was seven taught me to embrace myself for who I was, and for who I was going to be. I loved watching gory movies and then replicating the FX makeup in the movies on myself or other people. I started morphing into the person who I know now, which is someone who is intensely passionate about their craft, a hard worker, at times an overachiever, and above all, someone who isn’t afraid to express who they are, even if they're oddly obsessed with a man who kills teenagers in their dreams.