A Little About Me :)

Hiii! This is a very informal page where I want to tell you a bit about who I am. I am 21 years old, born to two amazing immigrants. One thing they always told me growing up was that they worked hard so I could live out any dream I wanted, so they encouraged me to dream big.

Ever since I was little, I’ve loved writing and music. I wrote my first song in third grade about a dinosaur having a birthday party. But as talented of a writer as I was, my voice was not quite up to par. Let’s just say, while I loved singing in my room, you wouldn’t see me on The Voice Kids. But… when I was about 8 years old, my grandfather told me that God had shown him a vision of me being a singer. He didn’t hesitate to basically force me to join his church’s all-adult choir, and my parents, wanting me to grow, put me in professional vocal training.

 But even with all this help, I still never got a part in any school plays, didn’t make district chorus, and didn’t make my school’s talent show. I decided to keep doing vocal lessons because I loved them, but I gave up on that dream of going anywhere with music.

When I got to middle school, I started facing challenges I never quite expected. I thought I was going to be overwhelmed with school, but I actually ended up dealing with various health complications. I needed surgery for a bursting appendix, which didn’t go well and left me with an air pocket in my stomach that led to months of pain and other diagnoses.

In my freshman year, I was homebound from school because, for six months, I couldn’t walk on my own due to severe, sudden, unexplained vertigo. In my sophomore year, COVID hit the world, and it hit my lungs. My asthma went from being occasional to needing a nebulizer every morning and night, plus extra medications to keep me breathing. In my junior year, my legs gave out, and I needed two hip surgeries. And in my senior year, I was diagnosed with PTSD and depression due to everything I had gone through, along with a traumatic event I experienced as a child. Even now, in my senior year of college, I can’t seem to catch a break from going to the doctor’s office. You can basically call me chronically ill.

I share all of this because I want any new clients meeting me to know that I’m serious when I say ARC Studios is meant for people who love music but are struggling physically and/or mentally. I want it to be a space for artists and musicians at heart who might feel like they’re incapable of pursuing music or expressing themselves through it because of their circumstances.

During all that time I was stuck at home, I had nothing but time to do the things I liked to distract myself. And a lot of that was songwriting. Again, I was no vocalist and no pianist by any means. But I showed up to vocal lessons, played random notes on the piano that sounded good, wrote my heart out, and sang it. And I found this form of relief, almost like therapy.

It was like when I was feeling lost in my thoughts or experiencing really strong emotions, I could write them out, add music, and sing them. Suddenly, my hard situation had become a really catchy song. I could go back to it when I felt those emotions again and release all the energy and emotion I had been building up inside me.

Near the end of high school, I basically decided what I was going to do with my life. I was going to be a realtor and keep doing my music stuff on the side. That was until my vocal coach signed me up for a vocal competition. I was terrified, but she told me just to go for the feedback and not think about winning. Well… you should’ve seen the look on my family’s face and mine when we were halfway out the door, with all our stuff in hand, and they called my name for first place.

I realized in that moment that I was good at music. I had no idea what had happened, but it changed everything. I told my music teacher at school that I wanted to take music seriously, and during one of our assignments, God gave me a vision of what I was going to do… I was going to build a studio. I didn’t know how, for what, or for whom, but I was going to do it.

I ended up applying to George Mason’s Dewberry School of Music two days before regular decision applications closed. My audition was terrifying, but I sang, talked about my studio vision, and knew God had put everything in its place when I got the email saying I’d been accepted.

But goodness, the story continues. My first semester was a wreck. I thought I was going to college to learn music, but it turned out everyone around me had grown up learning music. I was the odd one out who didn’t know anything. And I’m not saying the professors weren’t good or fair, but I realized there was a huge stigma and a high standard for anyone who wanted to pursue music. It was strict, hard, and fast-paced. I cried almost every day and seriously considered quitting. I was still going through health issues, I was weak and stressed, and I felt like I had no place being there when I didn’t know anything.

And that’s when it hit me. I want to teach music to people in a way that doesn’t make them feel like that. I don’t want to shove rules and deadlines in their faces. I want learning music to feel free, flexible, fun, and judgment-free.

Only by God’s grace did I get through that first year, and every year after that. But I also realized I was capable of so much more than I thought. I know so much more than I did when I started, and I love sharing that knowledge.

I love seeing my students’ faces light up when I explain music theory to them, especially when I remember feeling like I was disintegrating in Music Theory 101. I love teaching piano scales to kids and seeing them get excited, especially when I remember running out of my piano class during an exam.

Of course, there are professional ways to go about running a business, like having set lesson times, policies that protect everyone involved, and predictability. But I also find the human things even more important, like understanding when someone is having an off day, being transparent in communication, and building trust between student and educator.

I guess my goal is to encourage you, whoever you are reading this, to write that song, sing that note, or play that piece. I think you can do it, and I think it will be a lot more healing for you than you might expect. You might even go farther with it than you ever imagined.

Feel free to email me if you have any questions about me or ARC Studios. :)