Small Habits, Healing Changes by Jendayi

Small Habits, Healing Changes by Jendayi - February 2026 Scholarship Essay

A cold Saturday evening has a way of making everything sharp, the air, your breath, my thoughts. That night, my mom and I sat in the car with the heater humming softly as we drove through a developing part of the city, the kind where new coffee shops sit beside boarded-up buildings and streetlights flicker with uncertainty, and unfilled potholes shook the car as the tires dipped into them. She had told me we were going to a poetry event. I imagined polite snaps, quiet claps, maybe a few dramatic pauses. I didn’t imagine how much that night would change me.
The gallery space was small and unassuming, tucked between construction zones and half-finished storefronts. Inside, the walls were warm with art and the room buzzed with a kind of nervous excitement. A variety of people filled the space, students, artists, young professionals, strangers who seemed completely at ease being there. Almost immediately, it became clear that this wasn’t just a poetry reading. It was participatory. Intimate. Demanding in a quiet way.
At one point, the facilitator asked us to take out a notebook and free-write for ten minutes.
My stomach dropped.
I had never been a journaler. Writing, to me, had always required rules: a prompt, an outline, a clear beginning and end. Free-writing felt like being told to jump without telling me where, how high or why. What would I write about? Was there a right way to do this? What if I wrote something stupid, or worse, nothing at all? Questions jumbled in my head so crazily that I almost missed the sound of pens hitting paper around me.
I looked up and realized everyone else had already started writing. Heads were down. Pages were filling. No one was watching me. In that moment, I mentally shrugged my shoulders, picked up my pen, and began to write…awkwardly at first, then faster, then without thinking at all. I didn’t stop to reread. I didn’t evaluate the words as they came. I just wrote.
When a small bell rang to signal that the ten minutes were over, I felt something unexpected: relief. Not the relief of being done with something hard, but the relief of having let something go. Over the course of the evening, we did more writing exercises. Some of the writing we shared aloud, others we kept private, sealed between us and the page. By the time we left, my notebook felt heavier, but I felt lighter.
I didn’t realize it then, but that night introduced me to a habit that would quietly change my life.
A few months later, I became a freshman in college, and intimidation took on a whole new meaning. I had loved high school. I was class president, surrounded by an amazing group of friends and teachers I trusted deeply. I had a job at a math tutoring center working with kids, a role that brought me confidence and joy, and reminded me daily that I had something to offer. I knew who I was there.
College stripped that certainty away almost overnight.
I was sharing a room with a stranger. Navigating a campus full of people who came from backgrounds wildly different from mine. Everyone seemed to know where they were going, while I felt like I was constantly one step behind, pretending I wasn’t overwhelmed. The independence I had once craved felt isolating. Without the familiar routines and relationships that had anchored me, my thoughts grew louder and more anxious.
That’s when I remembered the notebook.
Journaling didn’t magically fix everything. It didn’t make college less demanding or erase my fears. But it gave me a place to put them. On nights when my mind raced with uncertainty about friendships, academics, whether I belonged at all, I wrote. Sometimes it was only a few sentences. Other times it was pages of messy, unfiltered thoughts. There was no audience, no expectation to sound polished or insightful. Just honesty.
Putting my fears on paper did something powerful: it made them real. Battles that once felt overwhelming and shapeless in my head became visible when written down. I could look at them, question them, even argue back. What had felt like an unstoppable wave of anxiety often turned out to be a collection of smaller, manageable worries. Writing helped me see patterns in my thinking, moments where fear was louder than fact.
That small habit of opening a notebook and writing without judgment quickly became an act of self-trust. It reminded me that I didn’t need to have everything figured out to move forward. I just needed to be willing to face my thoughts instead of running from them.
What started as an intimidating ten-minute exercise on a cold Saturday evening has become a grounding routine that shapes how I approach both my academic and personal life. Journaling has taught me to slow down, to reflect, and to give myself the same patience I offer others. In moments of uncertainty, it helps me reconnect with who I am beneath the noise.
Success, I’ve learned, isn’t always built through grand gestures or dramatic transformations. Sometimes it grows quietly, one page at a time, in the courage it takes to sit with yourself and write anyway.