 Welcome to Major Moments of Mindfulness, The Lightenment Show. I'm Andrea Marion, creator and host. Your mindful awareness and focus happen naturally all the time. At the end of the day, those are the moments you remember. And intermittently, this awareness reaches a significantly higher consciousness level. A deep insight or intuition arises that changes life in a small or grand way. This is a Lightenment Moment, which I explore with guests in each show. Today is about Dulcé's Lightenment into Unknowns. Dulcé Silva, pronounced she-her, 20 years old, is a Dartmouth college major in English, writing Concentration. A first-generation low-income college student, she grew up amidst a close family in East Los Angeles. Through her young life, Dulcé ran into multiple unknowns and faced socioeconomic circumstances, cultural and vocational and personal anxiety barriers along the way. Here is where she looked into her first unknown on the pages of books, leading up to the Lightenment Moment. I always talk about Mary Lou, and it's the series. It's the book and the writer that got me back into reading when I was in middle school. I can't really pinpoint the moment that I knew that this book had changed my life. She's very passionate about what she does. She has this ability to really create and develop these characters, make a phenomenal plot, and furthermore, just create the worlds that you couldn't even imagine. Dulcé has much to relate and admire in one of Marie Lou's main characters, Day, whose dystopian home is futurized Los Angeles. Day is confident, though socially disadvantaged and from a poor sector of the city. Day's character in Legend says, each day means a new 24 hours. Each day means everything's possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time. Dulcé says she finds inspiration in these words on the page. I am Mexican American. My family is Mexican, and it's that I really want to be a voice for my community and the Mexican community. I'm currently trying to work on a novel with one of my favorite genres of dystopia, but making the female character Latina, which I'm really excited to kind of put in little details about my culture and just experience that whole new world. I really went out as much as a kid or like as a, I guess like a preteen, and I think that it really has to do with the fact that my mom is a mother and she's really overprotective of me. I am the oldest child. And I think she was just scared of the world, which I think it's very valid to feel as a mother. And I think it's an interesting dynamic to attend a very prestigious university and be Mexican American here. But I'm doing this because my parents have endless support and love for me and want me to follow my dreams and accomplishments. I need to be a better version of myself to gain a better life. And for her, she never had that, nor has anyone really in my family because they all came from Mexico. Dulce came to attend Dartmouth. She met Megan Fernandez, South Asian American poet at a gender and studies program. Dulce says she admires the poet as an artistic voice for her minority group. And Fernandez in her poem, Dignity, expresses what Dulce struggled to gain as a child in her first school years. Fernandez writes, At the grocery store, I asked where they sell dignity. And when the clerk says, sorry, what did you say? I explained that I'm looking for dignity, having lost so much in the last year and was wondering. A really interesting fact about me is that when I was younger, because my household speaks only Spanish, when I was younger, there was a hard time for me. I had a very, very hard time to read in English. It took a while for me to properly pronounce words and read properly for my age. During those first years at school, as Dulce searched for words in English and struggled culturally, she also reached for dignity as emphasized in Fernandez's poem. In Dulce's favorite legend series, the character Day says, My mother used to hope that I would rise from my humble roots, become someone successful or even famous. Reaching out of her own humble roots, Dulce's childhood search through books and characters and poems led her to take the step beyond reading into writing. This is where her enlightenment experience brought about life change. Over one time with my family and we're hanging out, it was just a casual gathering when all of a sudden my cousin looks over at me and he sees this little beige $1 store notebook with a bunch of stickers that I found and do you write in there? I'm like, yeah, I write, you know, I carry. And he was like, oh, you're a writer. This moment of like those movie scenes where like everything stops and you're like trying to understand what's going on. That's what it felt like. It felt like magic. When Dulce realized she was a writer, the enlightenment insight, her brain was creating new pathways for her future life. Author Justin Michael Williams writes about this neural process, introducing readers to the reticular activating system, or RAS, tells you when to solve things, whether it's missing your car keys or what attracts you as a future profession. When Dulce's cousin spoke those words, you're a writer. Dulce's RAS woke her up to her future. High school teachers recommended her for the college match program, which stood firmly on affirmative action principles in place from 1965 until 2023. With college match support and encouragement, Dulce earned admission to Dartmouth, a big step into the unknown. Right now, our Supreme Court, which has done many things to affect minority groups, affirmative action was one of them that really struck a nerve with me. And I really realized, you know, these are kind of the actions that affect so many people, such as myself and our future and my sister. And as a sister, as a student, as a citizen of the country, I am deeply hurt by the decisions that are being made right now. So I realized that this is the voice that I want to shine within my writing. Beyond these socioeconomic circumstances, Dulce faced another barrier and unknown, culture's judgment that the humanities is considered less than a substantial profession. People around me didn't particularly saw writing as a perfect career, but I think that along with STEM, humanities and writing is the future. It's important because we use it in our everyday lives. You could say, Dulce faced a choice between a rock and a hard place. Her passion for writing and the need for a financially successful future. Poet Fernandez writes about life-tight spaces in her poem, Silla and Sherevitas. Here's the poem. I like when the choices are both ugly, the rock and the hard place. Odysseus chose Silla, and I too would have opted for a terrestrial evil. The sea vortex probably concealing some subterranean meat. Dulce metaphorically feared drowning on her college voyage and expresses her doubts and intentions in her blog, Above Sky Thoughts. Here's her post. I write as a way to express myself and release my thoughts. A form of coping, I guess, because truth be told, life is hard. Sometimes holding ourselves above water takes all our strength and we don't want to drown. We're just scared. So again, I'm trying to learn to be okay with this fact. This is me, and this is what keeps me up at night. I have recently talked about my own experiences with anxiety, and that's something that is very personal to me. Mental health is really important, and I really want to explore and be an advocate for that. Telling stories is important. I think you learn from people's experiences and different emotions that you feel when reading. Find your story, go through your journeys, make your mistakes, learn from them, and something good will always come out at the end of the day. Get with who you are along with everyone else. This is The Lightman Show.