When I examine my life with a literary lens, the place I always end up landing back at is the Taekwondo mat. While the mat may sound like an unusual place for reflection, with echoing yells, bright lights, and snapping kicks, it's the place where I first learned to read people before I learned to analyze texts. Every class I go to is like its own story, with students stepping onto the mat with their fears, motivations, and expectations being revealed through small, unspoken details. Through teaching Taekwondo I mastered noticing those details; the way a student's posture changes when they hesitate, how their breath changes when they are confident, how silence has its own way to convey meaning.

Looking back on my experiences, I realized that this is why literature fascinates me. Stories are built up on the same quiet signal I noticed on the mat. The character’s hesitation, an unspoken conflict, a repeating idea, all these points feel familiar because of the year I’ve watched them all play out in front of me in real life. What I have started to love most about literature and martial arts is that they reveal growth not through dramatic scenes, but with subtle shifts, like a character speaking the trust they have been avoiding, or a student standing a little taller.

This portfolio is a collection of how I have learned to interpret and translate meaning, whether that be in a piece of literature or in a sparring match. I feel drawn to those moments in which people are able to discover things within themselves and that is the story I keep returning to.