I love it. I secretly love it.

When I was 18 years old and finishing my senior year of high school, I was diagnosed with a really rare kidney disease. They told me that I only had 34% function in both of my kidneys. And I would need to stop playing soccer, which I had gotten a scholarship for to play at San Francisco State. So, that was really difficult for me, but I was able to finally find myself. Once you stop a hobby that you have been doing your whole life, you kind of have to look in other directions for inspiration. So that is what I kind of did.

I found so many other things that I was good at and so many other things that I liked to do, instead of this one thing that I was so wrapped up in. I ended up going on the debate team in college and I really succeeded at that. I don’t look at my kidney disease as a burden or a problem but more as something that kind of opened up my life to make me a stronger individual.

I’m able to ground myself a lot more in life now and see that some problems are a lot bigger than others. The most important thing in life is health, more than anything. I have a different perspective, especially as a 22-year-old girl living with a kidney disease but…I love it. I secretly love it.

When I was 8 my friend invited me to a FAO Schwarz sleep over and they gave us $100 to spend and our last $15 we decided to spend it on each other. My best friend, picked out a little dog. My favorite animal at the time was a monkey, still is. She picked out this monkey and I named it Alexa after my friend. I still have it, 15 years later. She still sleeps with me. She does a lot for me, more so, she’s super comfortable as a little pillow to lay on. She has this little beer belly that I just like to snuggle my nose and face into when I just need something. It’s more of an abstract concept. It’s just something I feel.