“My Dream” by Jaelah Fernandez
From the age of five, my ultimate dream was to be a doctor, not for the money, but instead for the ability to help others in a way that not only healed their physical wounds but also their emotional ones. My faintest memory of when my love for medicine started was when I was five. I remember taking a ziplock bag, opening it up, and spinning around in my living room, trying to inflate the bag with air. Then I would take a headband and wrap it around my friend’s arm. I would take the air-filled ziplock and put it close to the headband, squeezing my hands around the bag, pretending it was a blood pressure cuff. As I grew older, I held on to this memory as I took my dreams along with me. My parents would adorn my room with books about anatomy, a stethoscope that would hang by my bookshelf, and a white coat that was too big for my eight-year-old body. That dream stayed with me as I grew, but life didn’t always make it easy to hold on.
When I started high school, I fell into a deep depression as my parents’ arguments filled the rooms of our apartment. The slams of doors, the raising of voices, and the loud footsteps became a weekly routine. As my tears engulfed my pillowcase, my life also began to drown. My grades started to slip, and my future started to vanish. On a cold December night in 2023, I decided that I wanted to take away my life. But I didn’t. God held me. In the darkest moment of my life, when my tears soaked the same pillow I had once dreamed on, He reminded me who I was. And maybe it was also that little girl with the ziplock blood pressure cuff, still alive somewhere inside me, begging me not to give up. So I picked up the broken fragmentations of my life and started to consistently study and write.
Writing became my outlet for all my sorrow and pain. My writing helped me earn a 1st place award in my junior year of high school for my poem ‘Skins’ and two honorable mentions my senior year for my poems ‘Lady’ and ‘This is America’. I also began to excel in my academics as I started to maintain an unweighted GPA of 3.8 and took multiple rigorous classes as well as college courses at my local community college. My love for helping people also shined brighter as I founded my school’s first community service club alongside three of my friends. Our club has raised money for our community closet and the Dana-Farber Breast Cancer Clinic during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. We have also collaborated with our local elementary school by bringing students from our school to volunteer to fold donated clothes, sort toys, distribute multiple items to different classrooms during the summer, and interact with students by playing board games and decorating their gym for dances.
Through all the pain, I never let go of the dream that began with a ziplock bag and a headband. I used my struggles as fuel, not only to rebuild my life but to become a light for others. I want to be the first in my family to become a doctor, not just to fulfill a childhood dream, but to show my community, my family, and that little girl inside me that healing is possible. That even when life feels broken beyond repair, you can rise, piece by piece, with God’s strength and a heart that refuses to give up.