Content warning: This piece discusses suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and sexual assault.
Walking across UCLA’s commencement stage, I carried more than a degree. I carried proof that I was still here.
My Bachelor’s degree reflected more than lectures attended, exams taken, and sleepless nights. It embodied the coping strategies I developed to manage suicidal ideation, navigate financial hardship, and process sexual assault, revealing how resilience is built through active effort and community support.
In my first Active Minds article, I shared how my evolving identity, grief, and mental illness shaped my advocacy. Now, a year later, I return to a question that surfaced repeatedly in my journal: How does Natalia find hope?
The truth is, I never found it alone.
Having survived two suicide attempts, I know how deeply survival is shaped by the people who choose to stay. After my first attempt, my younger sisters became the reason I kept pushing beyond high school. After my second, my closest friends helped me imagine a life beyond college and L.A.
Their love did not erase my trauma or make healing linear. It gave me the strength to keep moving forward.
My loved ones stayed close when my spirit felt far away. My mentors reminded me that I was more than my past when trauma clouded my vision. My peers showed me everything we could achieve by supporting one another. Through Active Minds and UCLA, I found a community where my pain could become a bridge, instead of a burden.
Again and again, my community held hope for me until my hands were steady enough to hold it myself.
During my senior year, I represented undergraduate students on UCLA’s Suicide Prevention Committee. I worked alongside students, clinicians, faculty, and staff to improve suicide prevention, early intervention, crisis preparedness, and coordinated care efforts across campus.
That work contributed to the launch of Hope Connects Us: Turning Collective Insight Into Campus Action, a campuswide campaign focused on four areas: promotion, prevention, protection, and preparedness.
Helping launch the campaign affirmed what life had been teaching me all along: hope is not passive. It is built when we recognize that someone is struggling and choose to stay by their side.
That same year, I found healing through Art History. Studying art taught me to slow down and appreciate the smallest details in life. As I saw how artists transformed memory, conflict, identity, and longing into enduring expressions of beauty, I began approaching every day with more kindness and compassion than ever before.
I also allowed myself to create.
Writing, music, film, and visual art became places where I could meet myself honestly. I did not have to become the perfect person others imagined or the damaged person they assumed me to be. I could remain unfinished and imperfect, while still being worthy of being seen.
Art gave me a medium to express the pain I could not put into words. It taught me that I did not need to rewrite every narrative about me. I only needed to protect the person beneath those narratives.
Maya Angelou’s poem “Alone,” featured in Poetic Justice (1993), captures the truth I was beginning to understand:
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
By the end of senior year, those words felt less like a warning and more like a lesson I could finally accept. Needing others did not make me weak. Their love helped me return to myself.
Today, hope lives in how I choose to use my second chance.
In this life, I want to support young people who have been stereotyped, marginalized, or denied opportunities because of circumstances beyond their control. I want them to know they deserve love and unconditional support. They are more than the labels placed on them. Their circumstances do not determine their worth, and they should never have to carry their pain alone.
I once thought hope had to arrive loudly and with certainty. Now, I realize it exists in the poetry of quiet, everyday acts of care.
Sometimes hope is a friend sitting beside you. Sometimes it is telling the truth, asking for help, or choosing to stay for one more tomorrow.
I have never stopped trying. Because people showed me love, trying became a little easier.
They held hope for me. Now, I aim to hold it for someone else.
