Signing Off

I never thought of myself as a good writer. I grew up in an artistic family, so people assumed I was naturally creative, naturally talented and naturally capable of anything in that world. My house was full of love, but it was also full of expectations. Expectations that always, somehow, pointed to me.

My mother reached the highest academic and professional positions. The message was clear. I was supposed to honor the efforts of everyone before me by going even further. And because everyone in my home was a woman, and everyone was a teacher, the pressure felt heavier. 

Be excellent. Be disciplined. Be better.

But I never felt perfect. Not even close. When I reached my adolescence, I cracked under the invisible weight. I felt sick in my head and in my heart. I felt empty and disappointed because I could not meet their idea of perfection. So I told myself I no longer cared about being perfect. That was the only way I knew how to survive.

Later, I realized something important. How do you surpass someone who has already reached so high? 

You do not compete. You leave.

I left Honduras and came to the United States for many reasons. 

The first was freedom. Growing up international, the United States felt like the destination everyone talked about. You hear the stories. Opportunity is everywhere. Everything is possible.

The second reason was uncertainty. I did not know my passion. I only knew Honduras did not have the resources I needed. For most of my childhood, I planned to become a neurosurgeon, a chemical engineer or an ophthalmologist. Instead, I chose communications. That choice confused people. Some saw it as wasteful. All the effort, all the sacrifices, all the money put into my education felt wasted on a communications degree. I carried that guilt silently, and sometimes I still do.

When I was young, I had a guardian angel who believed in me. They gave me my first access to technology, an iPad which became my door to the world. But guardian angels do not always stay. Sometimes they leave to find their own purpose. When they left, I lost both them and the financial support that kept me in school.

I am a person of faith. Deep faith. Sometimes faith is not about religion. Sometimes it is the simple, stubborn promise you make to yourself: I will do it no matter what.

Being eighteen in a foreign country trying to survive, felt terrifying. This was supposed to be my golden ticket and I was watching it slip away. But it was not just about me. 

It was about my mother, who never had the life she deserved because she spent it caring for a sick child. It was about my grandmother, who raised both of us. It was about my aunt, who drained her retirement so I could have a chance here. I would not waste their sacrifices.

I knocked on every door I could find and eventually one opened. That door led me to another guardian angel. And that changed everything.

I learned more as a student at the University of New Haven than I ever expected. I arrived at seventeen convinced that I had made it. I had not made anything. I was just beginning. And even now, I am still beginning.

Graduating from the University of New Haven is not just a milestone. It is the end of a chapter that demanded transformation, discipline and honesty. I am grateful for the curriculum, but what shaped me most were the lessons that were not in any syllabus.

Here, I learned what I am and who I am. I learned how I think, how I work, how I adapt and how I fail. I learned what integrity looks like in practice. I learned how to build a life far from home, in a place where nothing resembled the world I came from. In a campus full of diversity, I had to figure out where I belonged as someone who did not fit neatly anywhere. I was an outsider. I still am. But I learned that belonging is not something you wait for. It is something you build by showing up, by doing the work and by refusing to disappear.

The faculty at the university taught me that my voice had value long before I believed it myself. They pushed for my presence in rooms where I thought I had nothing to offer. When I had no one to advocate for me, they did. I will not forget that.

As I move forward, I want to keep studying, filming and telling stories. I want to create work that recognizes the complexity of people like me: people who live between countries, between identities and between expectations. My dream is to build a studio in the United States and another in Honduras and move between the places that shaped me.

I may not know exactly what comes next, but I know who is walking into it. And for the first time, that feels like enough.