After losing my optimism, nearly 12 years of memory, and my hope all over again, I sat on my apartment floor and painted what I then entitled #6. After my sixth concussion from yet another freak accident, my brain could not produce the words to express my hopelessness. With a reality almost as painful as the chaos in my head, I used abstract art to express the emotions I couldn't articulate.

“Mami, in all the books I read, why doesn’t anyone look or act like us?” I’m told I started reading before I was three years old. I quickly advanced from picture books with one word a page to early reader chapter books to volumes of fantasy, self-help and scripture. I devoured words, sentences, and paragraphs; inserted myself into fictional worlds so much that I lost track of reality; and checked out dozens upon dozens of books at the library, quickly realizing that I did not feel represented by my favorite childhood characters.

I sat with my back against the Mount Kailash School in Nepal, facing the Himalayas. My volunteer group was fixing up a schoolhouse for over 200 Tibetan refugee students.

During a break, we asked the children, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

The children immediately responded: "I'm learning English so I can be a teacher."

"I want to be a dancer and a mom."

"I want to be a cook."

"I want to be a doctor!"

I was happily stunned.

My Aunt Connie hands me a steamed Shanghainese crab, roe side up. It drips butter, yolky orange, down my fingers — like custard and sweet milk. Somehow I always end up with the bigger piece, because that’s just how Connie is. I feel my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, but I don’t know if it’s crab butter, or something more sentimental, like love. I’m not sure there’s a difference.

New storms are named almost every week, storms that can be troubling to us East coasters, places like the Georgia coast where I am from. In the past couple of years alone, my family and I have had to evacuate twice, leaving our home and everything behind. Rains and wind would come in damaging amounts, and we would come back after a couple of days not knowing if our house would even still be standing.

Imagine this, you find yourself waking up to loud thuds of heavy rain hitting the tin roof of your 8 x 8 ft home. You forgot to take off the wooden board that covers your 3 ft deep clay pot that is your water source for everything including showering, cooking, and washing the dishes.

You have access to a well but collecting rainwater is much cleaner than the water out of a well. You quickly run outside to uncover your clay pot in hopes that the rain will fill it up before it stops pouring, so that by tomorrow you may use this water for your daily needs.