The first painting I made that I actually hated taught me more than any painting I loved.

It was sophomore year. I had spent three weeks on a large-format oil piece — a portrait of my neighborhood in East Oakland, layered and deliberate, the kind of work I thought "serious artists" made. When I stepped back and looked at it, something was wrong. The colors were technically correct. The proportions were accurate. And it was completely, utterly lifeless.

I left it against the wall for two weeks and refused to look at it. Then one Tuesday afternoon, out of frustration, I picked up a palette knife and started scraping. Not destroying — excavating. Underneath the careful surface, there were mistakes I had painted over: a streak of cadmium orange, a thumb smear, an accidental gesture that had more energy than anything I had intentionally placed.

I stopped trying to fix the painting. I started listening to it.

That shift — from imposing to listening — changed how I approach every problem I care about. In my AP Environmental Science research project, I stopped trying to prove my hypothesis and started letting the data redirect me. In my role as editor of the school literary magazine, I stopped trying to make every submission sound like me and started asking what each piece was trying to become.

The painting still hangs in my room, half-scraped, unresolved. I keep it there because finished things stop teaching you. I want to study visual art and cognitive science at Princeton to understand why — neurologically, philosophically — humans make things that talk back.