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"How has your journey with CF shaped the problems you want to solve and the impact you hope to have on others?"

Cystic fibrosis is a nasty condition. It mars my organs, causing them to fail one by one; it makes even small colds a battle; it clogs my insides with thick mucus, settling in my lungs and choking my breath and creating a habitat where pathogens can flourish. When I imagine what lies just under my skin, I envision a revolting, sticky mess of scarred organs and dripping slime. Yet, on the outside, I'm a normal 19-year-old girl, maybe a bit on the small side. No-one can see what lies beneath. The only times anyone knows that I'm different are the few occasions when I've had to do therapy in public—and at those times, strangers have stared at me like I'm a curiosity. It's ugly, it's repulsive, it's difficult to explain, and I don't particularly want other people to know that there's something wrong with me. It's better to stay silent, to hide the broken bits of me away where nobody has to look at them. At least, that's how I used to think. In my pre-teen and early teenage years, I never told a soul. I was terrified of what my friends would think of me if they knew; how they would look at me, how they would talk about me when I wasn't around. But my fears were unfounded. After years of hiding it, I was finally forced to confess, and they didn't treat me like I was weird at all. That was the beginning of a change in me, the beginning of a new sort of courage. In recent years, I've gone from refusing to talk about my CF at all, to willingly sharing my experiences through writing. During one of my classes in the fall semester, I had to write an essay about a difficult thing in my life, and I chose to write about cystic fibrosis. I wrote it thinking that only my professor would see it—but she liked my essay so much that she asked me if she could read it to the class. I told her (a bit nervously) that it would be alright. Afterward, multiple people came up to me to tell me that they liked my paper, and a few even asked me questions about my CF. I realized that, through writing, I was not only able to help myself cope with the condition, but also spread awareness of CF. Over the course of this past semester, I've written about CF even more; for example, a poem that I wrote was displayed in the art showcase at the college library, and later, my mom shared it on her CF walk page. With words, I have the power to reach people. I imagine that, in the future, I could use my writing to assist with grant proposals for new research, create websites and blog posts, and, most of all, make CF heard and seen, so other people who have it know they are not fighting alone.