Thankful

Over the past two months, I have been vigorously scanning sidewalks for loose change, saving with abandon and campaigning on IndieGoGo to raise money for my first semester of Graduate School at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

I have received incredible support from family, friends, colleagues and relative strangers over the past few months and I wanted to express how truly thankful I am for all of the advice and donations. I am incredibly grateful to all of the sponsors on my IndieGoGo campaign, as well as those who have helped me gather and submit my application, wrote heartwarming references and aided me in the financial aid process as well as the friends who have helped me in my move to a new city.

I have been blessed with kind and thoughtful friends, and have been frequently surprised with generous notes and offers of support, and would like to take the time to share with you all of the people that have selflessly helped me get to where I am.

Friends, Supporters, Donors and Sponsors of my fundraising campaign, I have no words to express to you how thankful I am for all of your help. We are, all of us, in a tough economic situation, and to be able to consider someone else when you have to look out for your own needs is incredible beyond measure.

To the kind teachers and mentors who have helped me become who I am today, I have found no gift worthy of repaying you for your work. To Nancy and Patrick, I am incredibly grateful for your thoughtful recommendations, and to Nancy especially for all of your advice through the years that I have known you. Thank you Robert, for helping me with my application process, dealing with my naivete and reading through my confused scribbling.

Last, but never least, I thank all of my friends who helped me drag boxes upon boxes of art books, exotic plants, and their fragile, yet incredibly heavy, glass enclosures down what seemed like hundreds of stairs in the scorching heat of an oddly timed late May heat-wave. I would never have been able to do it on my own, which should really teach me not to collect so many random pieces of relative garbage, but I have never been able to help myself. So, thank you! Thank you for dragging and pulling, dealing with me and the three legged chinchilla I carried around in a cardboard box, listening to me yell at UHaul as our truck broke down and attempting to make me feel better when all you wanted to do was slap me and tell me to get myself together. Thank you!

At the end of every journey, you are confronted with the loss of people you have considered indispensable, who may not have grouped you in the same category, but with every new beginning, you keep with you those that have truly been there the entire time. I am incredibly thankful to go off on my new journey knowing that to my heart are bound true friends who will be with me no matter where I turn.

"It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly." - Charlotte Brontë

Let us never go to Ireland?