I have spent my entire life loving art, and being too afraid to act on that love. One of my earliest memories is being stumped by the common question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I knew from a young age that I enjoyed drawing and painting, but I had no concept of what that could possibly equate to in terms of a career. I didn’t see people with artistic jobs in my daily life, so I didn’t understand how painting pictures could be anything more than a hobby. Thankfully, this mindset didn’t last long.

As I got older, I discovered there was a vast variety of jobs centered around art. In elementary school, I dreamed of a career as an animator. In middle school, I decided I’d prefer storyboarding instead, and in high school I shifted my focus more to character design, all the while improving my skills along the way. Unfortunately, high school is also where I began to doubt my future in the field.

Sophomore year was my first time taking a formal art class since elementary school, and almost instantly, I hated it. Maybe it was the strictness of the teacher, or because not everyone in the class was as passionate about creating art as I was, but practicing my favorite hobby, my future, became the worst part of my day. To make matters worse, I’d known art careers could be challenging and less lucrative at times, but with the impending doom of college looming over myself and my classmates, I felt more pressure than ever to make the “right” choices about my future. It was terrifying! I started to believe that if I couldn’t handle one class, I certainly wasn’t cut out for a major or career in the arts, and I began convincing myself to look somewhere else, anywhere else.

The year after, I excelled in AP Environmental Science, and because it was something Ifound interesting, I decided to ignore my passion that I’d pursued for over a decade, and instead settled for a future without art. I graduated high school the year after that with the intent to major in environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara; then the pandemic hit and all of a sudden I was attending a community college to save money and had two more years at home ahead of me. During those two years of going to class from my bedroom, not much changed. I decided to switch my focus to urban studies with a specialization in sustainability, which is how UC San Diego ended up on my radar and became my dream school, but when the time finally came for me to begin studying to reach what I’d spent the last four years convincing myself was my dream career, I quickly realized this was not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life. As the weeks dragged on, I felt this horrible sinking feeling that I’d made a mistake, not only in the fall quarter, but in all the years I’d let pass pretending to be someone I wasn’t. I remember finally calling my parents in tears one night, confessing to this mistake but promising that I’d done the research on other majors and that I had a plan for myself and could they please not be upset with me for this; and they weren’t. I had never been met with so much genuine support, and it truly gave me the strength I needed to reclaim my life and reset my trajectory. I’m now enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Computing and the Arts Major here at UCSD, and after all this time, I couldn’t be happier.

Now that you’ve seen a broad view of one perspective of my lifelong journey as an artist, I hope that you can more deeply feel the meaning of my piece. Your Eye, My Storm is a recreation of a painting I made in preschool. My parents have had it hanging up in our garage practically since I made it nearly two decades ago. It’s worn now; the paint is sun-bleached and the butcher paper is curling. I don’t even remember what it was supposed to be, but I’ve always likened it to the spot on Jupiter. Regardless of its intents and purposes, it reminds me of a time when art was pure fun and exploration, which is a delightful mindset I’ve found myself returning

to recently.

Your Eye, My Storm as a title acknowledges both my past and present selves; it thanks my past self for her artistic vision and creation of a painting reminiscent of the eye of Jupiter’s storm, and it thanks my present self for her perseverance in the art field, despite the hardships and “storms” along the way. Long story short, it’s a labor of love, and a touching connection to my past. In bringing life to this new version, I wanted to pay homage to the little girl who loved to paint beautiful pictures with bright colors because it made her happy. I want to show her this, show her how far we’ve come and what we’ve achieved, and I want to promise her that she will end up exactly where she’s meant to be, because she is resilient.