I still have a highlighter-streaked notebook from a rainy afternoon at my middle school, the pages warped from my backpack getting soaked, the ink a little smeared, everything glowing yellow anyway. I remember sitting in a crowded classroom, bell blaring, while my social studies teacher explained what your First Amendment rights actually meant. I didn’t say much, but I wrote everything down.

Long before that, I used to sit on the stairs at home and eavesdrop on my dad’s late-night phone calls from his office. I didn’t understand the legal jargon, but I picked up the cadence, the careful questions, the long pauses, and the way words could shift any situation. It was my quiet introduction to how law works in real life.

Last summer, I took criminal justice classes at USC, trading my high school classroom for a packed lecture hall where professors challenge easy narratives about punishment, power, and fairness. The experience made me more skeptical, more curious, and less willing to accept simple explanations.

When I’m not thinking about law or history, I’m usually reading or writing poetry, or scribbling lines in the margins of whatever it is that I’m studying. I like precision, in a poem, in a news story, or in a legal argument from Suits.

I write to slow complicated moments down, look at them closely, and understand what they reveal about people and power.