Week 1

 Hannah Morris

Hi! My name is Hannah Morris, I am 16 years old and a junior at Henry Clay High School. I moved here from Florida about a few months over a year ago, so last year was my first year at Henry Clay. Moving here has honestly changed my entire life, and not just in the literal sense of I-Moved-States. Throughout the last year or so of living in Lexington I have made the closest friends I’ve had in my whole 16 and a half years of being alive, as well as grown a sense of becoming so much more comfortable and less insecure about myself.
My freshman year at a high school in Florida was pretty bad. I never really got around to having close friends because I had gone to a super small private middle school leading to a complete lack of known faces at the high school I attended. I had some friends come and go throughout that year, and ended up eating lunch in my favorite teacher's classroom everyday. I dreaded going to school and had to fight the urge to fake puke my way into getting out of it every morning. I was not always successful in that challenge, though.
Aside from not having too many friends freshman year I was also struggling with a lot of mental health problems that arose from my equally-bad middle school experience of being heavily judged in a small catholic school and big homelife issues. While I had friends and met amazing kids there, hardcore religious teaching was not something that I felt comfortable around due many aspects of my own identity and beliefs. Plus, the kids were mean because middle schoolers are just RUTHLESS.
Due to the whole school thing as well as numerous impactful issues in my home life, I turned to art as a way to cope with my emotions. I started animating in the 6th grade, which is kind of funny because it’s a sort of hard concept to grasp that I still probably don’t know much more than the fundamentals of it, even though I’ve worked on numerous animated projects since then. To keep it short, art was one of the only things that I truly felt proud of as well as accepted by, because art can basically be whatever you want. I still work on animations and art projects everyday, and I still love it to death.
Sometimes when I think about it though, I feel as though those times in my life have made me into the person I am today. Not that I am super strong now or anything, but I have definitely grown from the scared and sad kid I was. Especially due to the fact that in January I got on ADHD and anxiety medication, and since then I have completely changed from being quiet and timid to not being able to shut up a majority of the time. And it’s pretty fun.