A few essays I've written

It felt as if the entire world was contained within that space.

All around me were construction materials and a group of people: police, firefighters, and families. I told them to move aside and allow me to work my magic. I gathered all the stones, bricks, greenery, and trees and created a town with the movement of my hands.

Next to my parents' bedroom was a little room where my imagination ran riot. When Aadi and I were young, this was the room where our parents would leave us, the only way they knew to keep us safe while they worked. Every day, I would create a story with the blocks I was provided. Some of the blocks were the size of my head, while others were the size of my toes. I would imagine the lives of these inanimate objects and give them personalities. Each story would teach me something based on my life experiences.

In this room, I created without limits and dreamed of exploring different worlds. I took up extreme sports and imagined kayaking down the Amazon River through my rusty XBOX 360 in the brown cabinet under the TV. On the red mattress in the corner of the room, I would write a fantasy extravaganza of a novel featuring my favorite childhood stories.

When guests came over, this room became the headquarters for our shenanigans. When I was not wrestling with my friends in the WWE ring before thousands of fans, I would be in the penalty shootout in the World Cup final, only for one of us to sky the winning penalty into the jai-jai ma. The jai-jai ma was the prayer corner covered by Hindu deities.

Nothing drew my parents' attention to the playroom more quickly than the soccer ball hitting the jai-jai ma.

None of this mattered once I realized I struggled to use my curiosity to branch out and create meaningful relationships with other people. I had spent so much time in the playroom developing my ingenuity that I felt burdened when I couldn't use it elsewhere.

In 7th grade, I joined a club that would force me to project my creativity: show choir. Slowly, I began to leave my playroom stories behind but realized they started to show up in different areas of my life.

Now, when I sing a solo to close out our high school show choir set in front of a thousand people, I am not Eshaan Dey. I am Freddie Mercury at Live Aid in 1985.

I began to use stories from the past. One such story was of suffragist Jeannette Rankin, who challenged the established order. I understood the power of true passion for reform when I journeyed to D.C. and lobbied Capitol Hill to increase the federal budget for USAID. At that moment, I felt like George C. Marshall, presenting the original blueprint for the Marshall Plan to Congress.

Although I have taken my stories out of the playroom, they still hold a special place in my heart. The jai-jai ma, which was used for errant penalty kick attempts, is now my sanctuary, where I pray every day. The games and bricks I once played with are tucked away in a closet along with the characters and stories I created with them. The open area on the far side of the room, once used for sports, is now a place where Aadi and I sit and talk endlessly when he is home from college.

Every time I enter the playroom, I see 5-year-old Eshaan with his giant blocks, and I smile, knowing that his imagination did not get lost but transformed into a passion for advocacy for real stories and real people.

The employee is always looking at the time. Ninety seconds in, I'm mid-statistic. Twelve billion dollars. Forty percent. With money on one side and labor on the other, my index cards are a complete mess. She gives a nod. Her eyes get glazed. The entire thing simply dies somewhere between my words and her ears.

I recall a time when I believed that advocacy was similar to a circuit. Once the facts are correct and connected, the legislator will see the light. My binder was so absurdly large that it required its own bag. In ten minutes, my friend used to make jokes about how I would be ready for the craziest court session rather than a staff member.

Rosa ran our prep session. She pulled me aside and said the facts were fine, but the room had gone cold. Then she asked the real question, why does this matter to you. I started rattling off numbers again. She just stopped me. She wanted the reason under them, and none of my cards had it.

Okay, here's the story I'd been sitting on the whole time. My little brother built a volcano for his fourth grade science fair and begged me to help rig a motor to erupt when the judges walked by. It worked, barely, and he looked like he'd won a Nobel Prize. I'd never mentioned it in a meeting. It felt too small, too personal. Turns out that was exactly the problem.

Next meeting, different staffer, I skipped the spreadsheet and told her about the volcano. The smoke curling out of the papier mache. The motor we wired together at our kitchen table. She put her pen down and asked a follow up question. Something clicked. The room felt warmer, or maybe that was just me.

By my second conference, I was the one running the practice sessions before Hill visits. I stopped a sophomore mid statistic and asked her Rosa's question. Why does this matter to you. She told me about her grandmother's medication and the pharmacy near their house that shut down. That's your circuit, I told her, proud of myself for stealing her line. She used it that afternoon, came back grinning, said a staffer wrote something down.

I want to study engineering. I like things that have a real answer, the kind that either work or they don't. Advocacy taught me a messier version of that. A design only means something once someone uses it and gets why it matters to them. Same goes for an argument. You can have every fact lined up and still lose the room if nobody feels anything. Facts build the wire. People are the current. I learned that the hard way.

Richmond built its dual degree setup with Columbia on that same idea. Three years of liberal arts, then two years of engineering courses at Columbia, so you're fluent in more than equations. That's the order I want for myself, learn how to listen and lead before I'm calculating stress loads. The equations still matter. I just don't want to learn them in a vacuum.

Back in that first hallway, the staffer never stopped checking the clock. These days, when I train someone new and watch a lawmaker's aide put their phone down to actually listen, I think about that meeting. The facts were never the problem. I just had to be the current myself, apparently.

"Give Zoeya strength on the court and clarity in the classroom." My dad will always say some version of that statement every night before dinner, hands linked around the table praying to God, and for years I treated it like a task, something to quietly complete.

I used to think that pressure came from one place, my family. My two younger cousins, growing up in that same house, taught me otherwise. It moved through the whole family and through everyone in our faith community who loved us enough to expect something. Nobody at that table meant harm, everyone just carried their own version of the same weight.

Our youth pastor once said something I still turn over. "Love and expectation walked into this house together a long time ago, and you're going to spend years learning to tell them apart." I laughed at the time because it sounded like a fortune cookie. I have not stopped thinking about it since.

That's the part I want a real vocabulary for. I can describe the pressure I've lived through and name where it came from, but I cannot explain why my family holds its expectations the way it does, or why my younger cousin hears that same prayer and grows up so differently than I did. Human development and family sciences would give me the framework for that: the research behind how families form patterns across generations and how faith and culture shape a child inside the same household. I do not want to study my family from the outside. I want to understand the mechanics of what I already lived.

The next time my name comes up in my dad's prayer, I want to hear it as something closer to a case study, one small example inside a subject I finally get to study on purpose.