All my life, I’ve wanted to be an artist. Before I even knew what it meant to be an artist, as early as I can remember, I loved it. I loved the process of drawing, painting, all the crafts we did at my tiny Montessori school. I also, admittedly, loved that I was good at it.

Art has always given me something to be proud of, to physically show my accomplishments and talent. I have a very vivid memory from the age of seven or eight in which my art teacher saw one of my projects and begged me to let her take it home and hang it on her wall. Of course, in retrospect, she was exaggerating, but that tiny moment has gotten me through many years of practicing and developing my craft.

Around the age of eleven, I started playing water polo. In Maryland where I grew up, water polo is not a popular sport. There were two options for teams to play with and both were two hours away from our tiny commuter town, so we (my mom) did the drive almost every weekday for two years. Then we moved. Annapolis was closer to a water polo team at the Naval Academy, but farther away from my Dad’s job. From that moment on, my Dad became a commuter, and we became water polo players.

For a while, I achieved equilibrium between my art-making life and my sports life, but when the looming juggernaut of college decisions crept into my periphery, I realized something: if I wanted to play water polo, I would have to give up my dreams of attending art school. As one can see now, I chose to go to a traditional college and play Division 1 Water Polo.

But this was not easy.

First, I had to change my passions slightly to get what I wanted out of life. My junior year of high school, I fell in love with art history. I had enrolled in an AP Art History course, and from the moment it began, my life started to finally…make sense. Learning about artists from the past, their skills, and their struggles really made me recognize my passion for learning and the importance of cultural preservation. My parents had always privileged me with frequent trips to museums and vacations abroad, so I understood this before to some extent, but seeing that the study of art, museums, and conservation was a true academic field gave me a lot of relief.

Finally, I found a place that valued art and looked at it from a societal and technical point of view. In this place, I've found a specific passion.

Though I now mainly focus on the study of art instead of practice, there will always be a place in my heart for making art. And though I may not want to be an artist full-time, with the study of Art History I hope to one day help the preservation of artistic culture so that every young child that falls in love with art like I did has the same opportunities and empowerment that I was so lucky to receive.

From all that I’ve experienced in my so-far-short lifetime, the most important lesson I’ve learned is that nothing remains the same. Your passions, your goals in life, and even where you call home can change in the blink of an eye. But through all of that, I’ve stayed true to myself. I look forward to the future and what it holds for me: my ideas may change as the world around us does, but I’ll always have art, and I’ll always have water polo.