I am starting to get comfortable with the idea that my journey isn’t linear, I look at it as layered. The black lines in this collage represent these layers, starting from me and going out into the world.

The images move from the personal to the meta and universal, depending on which line they are nearest. The innermost line is me, and I think that’s where the journey started. It brings together my values, actions and ideas showing me the steps I need to take to create the life that I foresee for myself. Moving outward, I'm learning to take this vision of my life and find like-minded people. I hope that together our efforts can make up and lead us to the next layer: collective action.

These people are helping me learn, just like I help them. Whether it's colleagues, friends, family or faculty they all contribute to my growth. The third layer represents this process of learning, the environment in which I want to do it and the skills I hope to acquire along the way. Bringing together these skills and like-minded people, the last layer holds the weight of all our aspirations and the larger challenges that we hope to address. All of this is in flux.

Looking around me, the one thing I'm sure of is that everything is transient and ambiguous. I'm okay with that, in fact I enjoy it. Through all these layers I am in the process of exploring myself, the people and the world around me. I strive to find agency in the decisions I make, and meet myself somewhere, if not halfway.