Senior Spotlight: Carson
Tell us a little bit about your senior project!
I did a dual project about mental health—that's what my presentation was about: depression, anxiety, PTSD—and then my actual project is a poetry book. Mental health is a very big thing in my family. So, a lot of the research I get from my life and talking to [my family] and talking to my therapist.
A lot of my process was finding words for the things I wanted to express. I know how they feel, I know how they work, but having to translate them into something younger grades could understand, as well as my peers, was the challenging part.
There are some misconceptions that come with mental health and I wanted to shine a light on that. A lot of people don't realize it's physical, as well as mental, and I wanted to emphasize this through my presentation, because a lot of my negative mental health is physical—and I just find that it’s something that's such a big part of my life and isn't known by many people.
can you talk a little bit about the poetry portion of your project?
My actual writing is going to be a lot of the explanation of my poems, because I write a lot of poetry about the things I always had trouble expressing—things relating to depression and mental health. Because I have dealt with it since I was so young and it kind of merged into a part of me, it was hard to describe, and through poetry I've learned to describe it and also understand things about myself. I have like 40 poems that I have to explain and translate into “this is why I did this certain thing,” and “this is why I paired this image with that,” and “this is why I used this certain wording.” I love doing it because I get to look back at my poems and be like, “what was I thinking when I wrote this?” But that's what my writing focused on, a lot of my own thoughts and then mixing in how poetry works and what my own mental health was doing at these points.
having come from a large, public high school, what was the transition to cwhs like?
At first, it was very jarring. I felt like I got way more confident. I think I had very low standards, especially when it came to men in my life. And then I came here, and I'm like, “Oh, men aren't that scary. They're actually nice!”
Now, it feels like people know who I am. I feel seen. I'm not a number anymore. I'm a person. If you go up to someone in the hall, they know who I am. They'll say, “Oh, she's the person who sits outside all the time. She's the person who goes here early.” I have a personality. I'm a person in people's minds. I didn't have that when I was at my old school.
what are you planning to study when you graduate?
Criminology and psychology. For me, it's more the mental health side of things. I see a lot of days now, police officers and people who go into law are not doing the best they can, and they're not very aware of mental health. My mom and my family have very bad experiences with that. But, in my mind, we need those people. We need to be able to depend on those people for the society to work. And if people cannot depend on the people who are there right now, I want them to be able to depend on me. And at least someone there is looking out for people.