Finding Your Passion & Purpose
At some point everyone has asked the question, “what is my purpose in life?” That is like a big question to answer, yet somehow the answer manifests itself in the most unsuspecting ways. Yes, it’s an honorable thing to say, “I wanna change the world” or “I wanna help people”, but you have to mean it. You have to recognize that you can’t change it all; find what makes you most angry, and that’s where your passion lies. Since high school, I always knew I wanted to be a child and adolescent psychiatrist. A lot of that desires stems from my family experiences and seeing the stigma of mental health in the African community. It made me very upset how easily mental health was dismissed in my culture, and I wanted to change that.
I had no idea how this purpose would develop or evolve. My senior year in high school, my friends and I created a girls group at our school. The idea was that we wanted to promote academic excellence and black girl magic. We would have bake sales to raise money for some cause, and we tried to make sure our members were earning good grades. After I graduated, the student group flopped, but I found a passion for mentoring. And after I got into Stanford, I had to share how I did it and that’s when I started my YouTube channel. I was giving advice on the college application process and talked about the things I did in high school that contributed to my acceptance. At the time, I didn’t know where this was going to take me, but if I helped at least one other person, my job was done. I wanted to create hope for other black students, to show them that getting into a selective school isn’t impossible. It’s hard, but not impossible. Then after my not so hot freshman year, I got back on YouTube and talked about it. I wanted to show that yes, I got into a great school, but I’m also struggling. I wanted to normalize struggle and failure. Especially for black students, we make it out of our high schools into these elite schools and then there’s pressure from all directions to excel in the elite school, yet there’s not that much support. As I struggled through pre-med, I was very angry by how this pre med system was NOT made for students of color, and through different avenues targets students of color as weed outs. No wonder the field of medicine, like many other fields, is still white dominated.
By my senior year, I felt more convicted to share how I turned my Ls into Ws. I wanted to show that when you fall, you get up only to fall a couple more times, but in the end you can get up. It was my duty to show that I wasn’t going to be another black student that dropped pre med, I felt it was so important to show people how far resilience can take you and the benefits of not giving up on your dreams. It wasn’t until I realized how many students would reach out to me thanking me for my videos or commenting on how real I was, that I knew I was making a difference. I like to call myself a walking life lesson; I take all the Ls in life so that I can share with others and help them from avoiding the same mistakes. Trust me, I don’t enjoy the obstacles and the failures, in fact, they weigh very heavy on me, but every time I go through something, I tell myself that I will be a testimony by the time I’ve overcome this hurdle. I genuinely believe I embody a life of service. Service comes in many different shapes and forms. For some people it’s volunteering or creating a product that will improve the lives of others. For me, it’s motivating others and sharing the realities people don’t always talk about. Relatability is so important, people respond better to hearing stories of others that are applicable to their own lives. We seek inspiration and motivation in the stories of others. However, it takes courageous people to be willing to share their stories, that in itself is an act of service.
