MSMS through my eyes: a photo essay

My community, my home, is my school, the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science. At MSMS, I can achieve whatever I set my mind to. I come from scraps and Southern tradition, but I have accomplished things that I never dreamed I would be able to, and I have learned the beauty of life from 200 classmates who have never once let me down in their love.

Coming to this school has taught me about the wonder of the quiet moments in life: drinking caramel coffee every morning as I read for University English Lit, or editing articles for our newspaper every week, or even finding a poem I forgot I scribbled in my journal for Creative Writing Club about the friends that make sadness seem less abundant.

MSMS has taught me to live both intuitively and intentionally; it has taught me to never doubt the importance of collaboration and to always create my own desired reality.

Here, I have a community of hard-working and creative people who encourage me in every one of my pursuits. I can be who I am in a state that oftentimes does not let me be who I want to be; I don’t have to be respectable, I can just be free. I reflect upon the happy life that I live and I am filled with an inexplicable sense of peace.

My Magnolia State, my Mississippi, is plagued by our struggling education system and a romanticization of a “heritage” that really means hate. However, MSMS helps show the world a different side of our state, a side where feminist isn’t a bad word and differentiation from the norm is the norm.

MSMS shows a glimpse of promise in rolling green landscapes filled with people who lost the hope of a brighter future long ago; it gives us a reason to keep dreaming of Sunday drives where confederate flags aren’t displayed proudly on front porches and conversion therapy ads aren’t plastered on highway billboards.

Mississippi is not irredeemable, simply in desperate need of our help in reformation. Mississippi is filled with prejudice, but a future of acceptance is still possible, and I look forward to my peers changing the state that we love into one worth loving.