Musical Expression: the Breath, the Voice, and the Self.

Leave a comment

I have a confession to make: I secretly love singing and I love working with vocalists. Some of my favorite gigs to perform include works like Mozart’s Mass in D and Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, Holst’s Four Songs for Voice and Violin, you name it. Not just because said gigs tend to be more laid back, but because I enjoy the musicality that follow vocalists around 24/7. I cannot help but be fascinated with how vocalists carry themselves daily. Vocalists approach music with their whole being as their instrument comes from their body: their voice. In many ways, I find vocalists are the embodiment of musical expression.

I never thought that my musical career would be so close to vocalists and singing in any way. I wanted to pursue my doctorate so that I could be a violin professor at a college or university. But those positions prove to be elusive at the moment, so I kept myself open to whatever might come my way. Unexpectantly, an interim director position opened up at a church and I took a chance. My role was to direct the senior choir and select hymns for church services. It was different from my career wishes, but to my surprise, I greatly enjoyed directing the senior choir. One year later, and the term “interim” was taken out of my position’s name.

Retrospectively, voice was my very first instrument, as I suspect it is the first instrument for many. I grew up attending a Lutheran church my dad was serving every Sunday. The services I attended and prefer to this day are very liturgical in nature, meaning there’s lots of singing involved. In fact, I spend most of my time during services silently asking: “Are we going to sing again? When do we sing again? Can we sing again?” Is it partly to do with how music tends to keep my attention span focused? Most likely. But music has always been the easiest way I express myself and feel connected to others. Singing is no different.

Everything musical, for me especially, begins with my voice. Music is expression, music is art, and music is human. Therefore, to master musical expression, one must connect with their voice and breath.

I think true musical expression has gotten lost throughout history as perfected studio recordings have the power to erase imperfections. Us musicians have become obsessed with the idea of perfection that is no longer sustainable. We’re obsessed with perfection to a point that our own expectations have become robotic. There is beauty in imperfections; imperfections are the very essence of human nature.

While plenty of musical instruments create sound through breath, this is not the case for string players. String players, most definitely, are guilty of becoming forgetful regarding breathing. So many of us are guilty of rushing so dramatically because we’re not thinking about our breath. It’s our way of showing off, it’s our way of being divas. Us string players will often forgo any kind of rest; quarter rest, eighth rest, sixteenth rest, who cares?! We don’t need to breathe! We can totally skip over it, right?

The process of my own understanding of tying my own musical expression to voice and breath didn’t start until around my undergraduate years at Gettysburg College. Admittedly, a lot of things in violin and music come naturally to me. Lyrical phrasing is one of my greatest strengths. At the time, however, I never truly thought of it from a vocal perspective. If you were to ask me when I was in high school how I played so lyrically, I don’t think I would have been able to properly verbalize it. The early days of my musical career was based on vibes alone.

It really wasn’t until my professor, Dr. Yeon-Su Kim, assigned Mozart’s Violin Conerto No. 5 to me did I start to process my understanding of musical expression, breath, and voice. At the time, Mozart wasn’t a composer I particularly liked, and I think Dr. Kim made it her goal to change my mind within my first-year. Throughout my lessons, Dr. Kim consistently pointed out the importance of opera in relation to Mozart’s compositions. She expressed that I needed to really do my research regarding the history of the work, as well as the important role opera had in Mozart’s compositional writing so that I could further understand how to interpret the piece. She believed that it was extremely important that I approach my learning of the piece from an opera singer’s perspective.

Upon the first time hearing this, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t particularly have a good opinion of vocalists at the time (I found so many vocalists to be too loud and cheerful; all much too loud for a massive pessimistic introvert like I was in undergrad), so I initially disregarded her comments. But Dr. Kim proved that her patience could last longer than my stubbornness, and kept repeating her point every lesson until it stuck. Sometime by October of my first semester, I started to understand her vision as I started to create my own imaginative opera set to this concerto.

My violin was to be the voice of a ditzy soprano character who was just so bubbly and ecstatic that she had fallen in love. Come the second movement, she would grapple with the thought that, perhaps, her love was more of a limerance and unrequited love. By the movement’s end, she reassures herself that her love is true. Then, come the third movement, a fight—between two individuals who wish to marry her—breaks out in the middle of a banquet, a dance if you will.

Naturally, creating some sort of story is what I have always done with music. But through Dr. Kim’s encouragement, studying a concerto from the lense of an opera singer opened new doors. Suddenly, I was focusing on details such as “where would the singer actually take a breath for this phrase?” or “what kind of silly faces would the vocalist make here at this moment?” or “which character is singing here and how does it equate to the scene?”

Sounds incredibly silly, I know.

Was this exactly what Dr. Kim wanted me to do when she insisted that I think of opera while study Mozart’s 5th violin concerto? Probably not. But the point is, she got me thinking differently, which is the point in taking lessons in the first place.

I think back on that memory often and how much it has stuck with me over the years. So many people over the years have asked me how do I make phrasing seem so easy. Some people are envious of the lyrical sound I produce. While a lot of it, as I stated earlier, comes naturally, I can now finally verbalize it properly:

I approach music as a vocalist, not as an instrumentalist. I have always done this, even in my early days as a violinist.

Some musicians have tried to approach music making by creating scientific methods. Some use numbers to keep track of the most important parts of the phrase, tediously making note of every tiny detail. While these approaches are fine and good, especially for score studying purposes, I find when applied that these approaches cause the music to sound cold. In a world that is so scientific, so mathmatic, and so technologically focused, it’s hard to remember that music is an art above all else. Science, math, and music coincide with each other, but each have their own seperate identity.

For me, approaching music with such sterile, methodological focus is counterintuitive, for music is not necessarily meant to be precise. I never quite understood the obsession with perfection some musicians, particularly instrumentalists, have in their day to day life. Sure, we all strive to be our best, but perfection? As stated earlier, that’s not humanly possible. Not even AI can achieve perfection since it is a human invention at the end of the day.

Again, I cannot say it enough: music is human expression and it is supposed to be imperfectly beautiful. This is why breath and voice are so important in music; it is because these two things come from our own body, our own self. For instrumentalists, it is so easy for us to separate our voice from our music because our focus goes into the techniques and mechanics of playing our instrument. But we have to remember, that our instruments are an extension of our voice, our instruments are an extension of the self.

I have to imagine that vocalists and other wind players (woodwinds and brass) that this concept isn’t necessarily new. While I’m sure some of your methodological approaches aren’t exactly like a vocalist’s, breathing is very much a part of every lesson, I must imagine. But for string players like me (and maybe keyboardists can relate to this as well), conversations about breathing rarely come up in lessons. Most of our lessons are focused on technical and mechanical issues that arise when you have to hold an instrument so unnaturally as a violin. Fixing technique is important and vital, but there comes a point where the pure technical and mechanical aspects of an instrument get in the way of the music. While not every piece of music is an opera, we must remember that every piece of music has voices and characters.

We must always return to the breath and the voice.

In a dream world where I became the professor I had wished to become, I would make some requirement for my students to be involved vocally in music. Be it through chorus or bringing in a voice professor to studio classes from time to time. That is how much I value the breath and the voice when it comes to violin playing.

I currently have a young student who started lessons with me in 2022 and is extremely passionate about music. Violin is their main instrument, but every summer, they take lessons of another instrument to feed their musical curiosity. This past summer, they took voice lessons. Before they went on this musical adventure, we had been discussing the finer details of violin playing which go deeper than simple technique and mechanics. It wasn’t until this student returned from their voice lessons this summer did our previous discussions finally sink in. They now approach violin and music much differently. Instead of constantly wanting to play as fast as possible, they understand why taking a consistent and comfortable tempo is important. Their understanding of phrasing of certain melodies is further developed. They now approach music with breath, with their voice, and with their whole self in mind. Because of this change, I am forever grateful that they took voice lessons on their own accord. It has already done wonders for their musicality alone.

My students often give me strange looks when I begin my tangent about how “we are one of the few instruments that do not require breath to make sound” and think I’m ridiculous for talking about it as passionately as I do. I tell them this as a reminder that their voice, musical or not, is important. In our current society, it is too easy to forget to think of our breath and our voice. We go great lengths to hide our heavy breathing after exerting any amount of energy, we do everything we can to supress our voices to be likeable. There was a time in my life where I felt as though my voice did matter, but it was through music where I felt like my voice, through my violin, could be truly heard. I must imagine that there are other musicians who feel the same.

The musical instrument, whatever it may be to you, is not just a tool used to create beautiful sounds; it is an extension of you, your breath, and, most importantly, your voice. Not all of us were born to be vocalists, but it is through our instruments that we can still beautifully sing.

Thoughts on the Beloved Suzuki Method

“Do you teach Suzuki?” is a question every string teacher hears from inquisitive parents looking to sign their child up for lessons. They have seen the videos of the tiny four year old playing flawlessly; of course they want their child to do the same! There is no doubt that the Suzuki Method is one of the most influential pedagogical methods in music history. 

But does that mean it’s the best? 

While the method is most specific to strings, it does have some overlap in other instruments (mainly piano). I have found it interesting, however, that all the other instrument families, from keyboard to woodwinds to brass, do not view the Suzuki Method highly. Even as a violinist myself, I do not think highly of the method, though I am forced to use their books for many students. 

Why is that? 

Before I continue further, allow me to summarize how the Suzuki Method is supposed to work in a general sense. Japanese violinist Shinichi Suzuki developed this method around the 1930s and post-WWII around the belief that all children have the innate ability to develop musical skills. He reached this conclusion from one singular thought: children can quickly learn their primary language by ear and exposure alone. By using this philosophy, he taught many students from a young age to play violin with decent technique. The method took Japan by storm and eventually made its rounds around the world. 

While this all may sound amazing to an audience member, as someone who knows how excruciatingly long it can take to get a student studying the Suzuki Method to prepare ONE piece to a polished state for performance, it it not as perfect as you think. 

One of the most glaring issues surrounding the Suzuki Method is that it creates students who severely lack music reading skills. While even I can attest that exposure to classical music helps one’s ability to improve repertoire quickly, if we are to treat music as a language, there is a fundamental flaw in Suzuki’s philosophy. 

Yes, it is true that children initially learn their primary language from hearing their parents and teachers speak around them. But in order to continue progress in mastering their language, children must learn the alphabet. They must learn how to read and write. They learn phonics. They learn syntax. They learn how to write paragraphs. So on and so forth.

This all applies to music as well. If we are to continue to treat music as a language, music, arguably, has two alphabets: a tonal alphabet and a rhythmic alphabet. While there is a section dedicated the “rhythmic alphabet” of quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes by using Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star in the early pages of the Suzuki Method, not much is dedicated to the “tonal alphabet.” Instead, the Suzuki Method heavily relies on placing fingerings above each note. This then causes the student to solely rely on fingerings to figure out how to play the music they are studying rather than actually reading the pitches on the staff. If the student is not listening as they are supposed to, this also leads to poor intonation.

If music is a language, then we must also realize that music has syntax. Students learn about this syntax aurally by studying scales and music theory. Naturally, as they grow into their ability, they learn about the complexities of the musical language. All of this learned music theory then builds to create paragraphs of larger musical works such as sonatas, concerti, and symphonies. 

See where this is going? The fundamental flaw of the Suzuki Method is not that it is inherently bad, it is sorely underdeveloped.

Let us return to my point about how excruciatingly long it can take for a student to prepare ONE piece. The Suzuki Method focuses on students to learn by ear (which is NOT a bad skill to develop, please do not twist my words). However, the main issue is that it HEAVILY relies on teaching students by ear. Because the method focuses on working with younger students from the age of 4 and up, this is most likely why Suzuki never saw it important to teach students music reading skills early on. 

How does the student learn the material exactly? By listening to their piece relentlessly and playing it from start to finish, with little to no target practicing, over and over. At best, this can take up to a few weeks. At worst, it’s much longer; it can take up to half a year to a year. 

Now, I am sure there are some certified Suzuki teachers reading this saying: “Are you using the method correctly? If you get Suzuki certified, you won’t have this problem!” I apologize, but I must politely say that I have completed three degrees in violin. While I still am a young teacher as I have been only teaching for nearly 10 years, I think I am already plenty certified to teach students the instrument, Suzuki or not. Additionally, I believe that no teacher should limit themselves to one specific method regarding teaching a musical instrument. I am not the same teacher I was 10 years ago, and I will not be the same teacher 10 years into the future. I do not believe that education is a finite resource. There must be flexibility in teaching and in learning, which is something the Suzuki Method does not necessarily allow.

Let’s continue. Another flaw of learning by ear (again, yes, still a good skill to have) causes is students are only taught to imitate what they hear and see. They do not develop a deeper understanding of music or a sense of music identity separate from their teacher or favorite performer. They are, for the lack of a better phrase, copying and pasting their technique.

Throughout my teaching, I encourage students to be creative. Because of my own vivid imagination, my personal preference is to create a story of whatever piece I am studying so that musical motifs and phrases can come alive. Every student’s imagination is different; some like the story idea, some prefer to imagine they’re creating a painting or a video game. You name it; as long as they are being creative, they can connect with their music on a deeper level.

However, the students I have taught who come from a staunch Suzuki background struggle with this, because they are only used to copying what they’ve been told. They lack creativity, which inherently, is unmusical. They must learn how to be musical later on, which seems counter intuitive given that they started violin to learn music. Overall, their musical abilities wind up being limited later on.

Many teachers, like myself, supplement the Suzuki method. But some do not. Many teachers only use the Suzuki Method and may consider any other method sacrilege. However, when a devout Suzuki teacher delays music reading as the method calls for, the student may eventually find themselves falling behind in school orchestra activities due to their lack of sight reading skills. They may start studying orchestral music that is beyond their ability to imitate what they hear. Then, if the student happens to switch private instructors who does not only use Suzuki, their new teacher must play a game of “catch up.” Which, from my own experience with many students in this scenario, is extremely difficult to rectify by the time they graduate high school and quit music forever. 

The Suzuki Method, if used alone, does a great disservice to students and teachers alike. 

Before anyone becomes too defensive, allow me to explain my own violin upbringing. I started violin on Essential Elements through my school program when I was 9 years old. I never once touched a Suzuki book until I became a teacher.

And yet, I am still an accomplished violinist.

This does not mean I think Essential Elements is a perfect method. While I do believe EE does a good job at teaching students to read, it has several flaws. For violin, it heavily focuses on the D and A strings, causing students to struggle reading G and E string notes. The Suzuki Method has a similar issue by focusing primarily on the A and E strings whilst ignoring the G and D strings. Another drawback to EE is that it is a method that is best used in a group setting; if a student is showing great progress beyond the group, then EE simply becomes too easy for them. Challenging the gifted student is one of Suzuki’s strengths, which ironically goes against what Shinichi Suzuki set out to do by creating his method for any and every child.

With all of this said, I must confess that despite my major qualms with this pedagogy, I still use Suzuki books when I teach. But I do not use them in the way you think. I personally view the Suzuki Method as a collection of books that have slightly more challenging pieces to retain student engagement. I do not view it as a method of beginning, I see it as a method of continuation. 

What are my goals, then, as a teacher? First and foremost, the wonderful thing about one-on-one teaching is that it is hands on for both teacher and student. Both parties can collaborate on finding the correct pace. I personally do not like to treat my studio like a dictatorship. I want my students to feel comfortable with communicating to me and I want our lessons together to be engaging.

One of my teachers taught me that the purpose of lessons is to teach students how to practice. I try to tell my students the same. For new students, I have taken a liking to using the Sassmannshaus Method, another violin method developed with young children in mind. Students not only learn how to read music, but they properly get to explore all four strings on the violin. With my older students, we spend time working on technique, intonation, and repertoire. I uphold the importance of studying all outlets of music; listening, score study, and individual part study. I spend a lot of time telling my students to be honest with themselves and to target practice the areas that they struggle with most. Yes, it is easier said than done, and it takes me saying this numerous times before it starts to stick.

But, in my opinion, this beats the alternative. What’s the alternative? The alternative would be Suzuki’s approach: listen to the music, copy the performer and teacher, rinse, and repeat. But here is my question: what use is a lesson, or an education for that matter, if the lesson plan is only mindless repetition?

I have spent years trying to find a replacement for Suzuki. I have spent years trying to develop my own. Yet, I always wind up returning to those plain, white books with the words “Suzuki” printed boldly atop. I have spent years teaching violin to countless students who have also studied piano easily pick up sight reading and ask myself: “What are piano method books doing that violin method books aren’t? Have we lost the plot? Surely we can do better?”

Yes, we’ve all seen the videos of the four year old violinist who can play flawlessly. But did we see the grueling journey it took for them to actually get there? Did the student understand how they actually learned the music? Do they know how to apply what they’ve learned? Yes, their technique may be “flawless,” but what use is flawless technique if you can’t read and understand the very music you’ve perfected? Music is an art, and surely art is more meaningful than perfection at the end of the day?

The Suzuki Method is, unfortunately, a necessary evil for violin methods. It has dominated the field for so long that it is impossible to think of teaching violin without it. There have been numerous violinists who have critiqued this pedagogy, and I am far from being the last. I do, however, think that it is time we are honest with ourselves and address the Suzuki Method directly: is it serving us well entirely? Or are there some of its aspects we can use while we discard the rest? If those of us who are tired of begrudgingly using the Suzuki Method to teach our students, why aren’t we addressing it collectively? Why aren’t we addressing it more directly?

I get it; we musicians tend to be stubborn. Don’t I know how long it takes to conduct research and create a new method? What can we do? If it’s not technically broken, why fix it?

But that’s the issue. The Suzuki Method IS fundamentally broken and we continue to do a disservice to our students by not creating something better. No other instrument seems to have this issue, so why do we, string teachers, continue to let it plague us?

With all of this being said, I am not saying that Shinichi Suzuki and the pedagogical method he created is bad. I am merely suggesting that he oversimplified music and violin learning to create a large swath of young musicians to appease the masses. He may have had a point that music can be treated like a language. Encouraging students to listen to classical music on a regular basis indeed aides their musical studies. However, just as students cannot entirely master their primary language by ear, music by rote cannot entirely be the only way students learn any instrument.

Yes, with the right teacher, the Suzuki Method works phenomenally. But I cannot help but think that if this method were truly the mass success it advertises itself as, all teachers of all musical instruments would praise and utilize it. Yet, the Suzuki Method seems to only remain popular amongst strings players.

Let us finally admit to ourselves that the Suzuki Method is flawed and outdated. It is in desperate need of adaptation. Let us be a better service to our students by taking its strengths with us toward a better musical future while leaving its glaring flaws behind.

Black Sheep

Leave a comment

[Originally posted on violinia.blogger.com on November 11, 2016]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being biracial.

Do you know how long it took me to fully understand accept this statement in regards to myself? 23 years too long.

You would think that in a country so diverse, one would never feel like an outcast in their entire life. You’d think every single person would feel welcomed and included no matter where they stand on the soil of this nation; after all, there’s a group for everyone. But it’s not like that here, is it? Actually, perhaps so much diversity results in more isolation rather than unity. We’ve never been the greatest at mingling with each other, have we? We’re very good at separating ourselves, staying with people who think like us, talk like us, and look like us. It’s too hard just to exist on the earth’s soil and work together. And our current climate does not help at all; in fact, it makes this blog post even harder to write and to share with you all. But it makes it all more important.

The feeling of isolation is what I’d like to focus on for my very first blog post, because it is something that I have felt for the majority of my life, especially in the beginnings of my musical career.

Now, I am an only child so there’s at least one thing I’m very good at, which is I don’t need others to constantly entertain me (I’m fine on my own) and there’s one thing I struggle with, which is sharing. So there is a difference between being alone and enjoying the quiet and feeling completely isolated.

I grew up in a predominantly white area in south central Pennsylvania. Born in a household where I never once thought it to be strange that my parents’ skin colors differed from each other, but as soon as I began the early stages of school, I quickly learned that was the oddball. The Strange One. The Black Sheep. Somewhere along the lines, it was ingrained in me that I wasn’t normal, that I was a freak of nature. I reached a time when I no longer wanted to go outside because spending even two minutes in the sun would make me three shades darker. I started to think that if I looked differently (pale skin, straight hair, lighter eyes, etc.), things would be better and people wouldn’t give me strange and nasty looks.

I’ve spent a good percentage of my life hating myself because I’ve felt so unwelcome at times. When I started joining the local junior symphony, kids would ask me: “Why do you play the violin? Shouldn’t you play flute or saxophone or something?” To most, when I explain this, the question seems innocent; clearly, there is nothing offensive about the comment. And sure, it’s not a fully loaded question, it honestly could be far worse, but if you read into it, why should I play either of those instruments? Why should I, or anyone for that matter, because of the color of their skin, be limited to specific instruments while others are given the full spectrum?

You’re probably already saying to yourself, “Why are you just retelling the stereotypes? We know that stereotypes aren’t at all true. After all, they are just stereotypes; anyone can choose whatever instrument they want to pick and still succeed!” Yes, you are correct, and I agree with you wholeheartedly. We live in a time and an age where this absolutely should be true. And yet, it feels as if we are far from where we should be. Times have certainly been better, and with current climates, things are certainly worse off, but there are still plenty of people who look with a judging eye. Let me reassure you, I’m not calling the music community racist because they are far from that; I will simply say that there are plenty of musicians in the classical community who are prejudice.

It’s always come from both sides of my race as well. In high school I felt judgement from the black community as well as the white; it was almost as if “why are you renouncing yourself and your heritage and acting like someone else?” When really, I was just being myself. As someone who is biracial, I’ve always felt that I had to choose a side; my mom’s white heritage or my dad’s black heritage. It could never be both in so many people’s eyes. When I continued my studies in violin, I felt that I would never truly fit in because I wasn’t, well, white. But I also felt that I wouldn’t fit in the black community either because I’m not black. In high school, I always felt like I was always in a quandary with myself and felt that I would never truly belong no matter what I did or what career I pursued. Throughout high school, I fought the churning unsure feelings in my stomach and continued to just do me.

But then it comes across as if I’m disowning my African American heritage as well. But it’s so much more complicated than that. When people first meet me and find out that I am a violinist, some assume that I must take in some interest in jazz music, performing and violin, which is far from the truth. To be frank, I’ve never been the biggest fan of jazz, hip-hop, rap, R&B, and blues. This doesn’t mean I don’t have songs on my iPod from those select genres because I do, but I cannot listen to these musical genres for long periods of time. For years, I thought that I was renouncing part of my heritage to get where I wanted to be, which was wrong of me to do. In this day and age, we should all accept where our ancestry comes from; it is a part of who we are and rejecting means that we are rejecting a part of ourselves.

It’s isolating, and that is by no means to living our lives, and I no longer want to live my life that way.

 

I cannot blame everyone for how I have felt for the bulk of my life, part of it is my fault as well. I let their words, their prejudice warp my brain. I’ve spent so many years hating myself because I wasn’t born white and beautiful like my friends or the people on advertisements or like the famous musicians you see on CDs in the classical music section of your local bookstore. It is mind boggling how easily and quickly that can mess with someone’s brain and idea of self; it’s something that honestly shouldn’t be. To think the way I have been thinking for the past several years isn’t innate, but rather something that is taught sub or unconsciously. I wasn’t born into this world hating myself, somewhere along the lines, I not only taught myself to hate myself, but society taught me to hate myself.

At the beginning of September, when I returned back to school for my Master’s degree, I told myself: “Enough is enough!” and have begun on a journey to accept myself for who I am and for how I look. It’s nowhere near perfect, and it most likely will never be perfect; there are many days where I slide backward and have a setback. But I can say that there are more days where I feel comfortable in my skin and know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with me. And I can say that with the start of my Master’s degree (there have been ups and downs throughout the semester which will have its own blog entry come December or January) that it has been reassuring being in the diverse area at Towson University. It’s finally nice to look across the orchestra from my seat and see African Americans, Latin Americans, Asian Americans, Caucasians and people of mixed races like me participating by my side. I no longer have to feel like I stick out like a sore thumb for looking different.

It has also been helpful to know that as I look into history, there have been plenty of people of African descent who were composers and musicians in classical music. All of the years I’ve believed that I was turning away from half of my heritage, it turns out that I’m still embracing it, just not in the stereotypical way people would like to see me do. Upon looking into and discovering this, I have decided that I would like to dedicate my Master’s thesis to the topic of Black composers and musicians in classical music. One of my goals in my career is to spread this information and perform music of Black composers because they are sometimes stashed away and hidden so that the more “important” composers can always be remembered and their music preserved. There is so much music repertoire that exists in the music community, and it would be a shame to forget the diverse members of the community when their works are just as good, maybe even better, than the Greats we always remember.

The journey of self-acceptance has only just begun for me, and I have a long way to go from here. This post originally ended in a much happier light in the hopes of a positive outcome for the election, but now that is no longer the case. It seems that the road to my journey has grown even longer because of the hate that resides in this land. I will not go into details because I am sure many know what I am referring to. I have been pushed down several times and I’ve always gotten up before. I will continue to not only fight others to prove myself, but I will fight the demons society has put into my head. I will fight in order to succeed in this uphill battle we all call life.