A Big Fish in a Big Pond

Myana can often be found in AcademySTAY's community garden.

Ask Myana where her ambition comes from and she won't point to a hardship. She points to a garden.

"Everything that has gone right is where my ambition is stemmed from," she says. "When I'm in the garden, getting the weeds out, that's everything that has gone right."

She'll tell you about the water it took, the people who built the beds, the plant she watched a woman split apart to pull thread from. She notices all of it. That's the thing to know about Myana first: she pays attention to how things get made, and she wants to make things too.

This summer, she's packing to leave.

Myana came to Sacramento from New Orleans on her own, chose Pan-African Studies because she wanted to be challenged, and then went and got challenged. She just graduated from Sacramento City College with three associate degrees, in Interdisciplinary Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Social Justice Studies. She was the inaugural recipient of the college's Gerri Scott Global Changemaker Award, recognized for her academic work and her service across its Black student and African-centered education programs. And in the fall she transfers to UCLA to study with the faculty who shaped the fields she's spent years reading, with a plan to become a professor and a creative educator, and a doctorate after that.

She almost didn't reach for the big version of that. She could have stayed close, transferred somewhere smaller, kept being what she calls "a big fish in a small pond." She chose the harder thing instead.

"What does it mean to challenge myself to be, like, maybe a big fish in a big pond?" she says. "That's what it means to go to LA. My community put that battery in my back, to let me know that wherever I am, I'm gonna shine."

One of the people who put it there was Elizabeth, her property manager at AcademySTAY. When Myana was torn over where to transfer, weighing the pros and cons and still stuck, Elizabeth asked her a question that cut through it.

"I asked her whether her hesitation was rooted in safety and fear rather than in what she truly wanted for herself," Elizabeth says. "If that was the case, I encouraged her to choose the more challenging path, the one that would open the greatest opportunities for her future. She did just that."

The move is possible because she built it herself, scholarship by scholarship. She spent the spring finishing a heavy course load and applying for funding at the same time, and earned enough to get, in her words, "close to not being in any debt." She'd heard the fear in her own head, the memory of watching her mom lose things, and she chose not to lead with it. "I approached it not as a deficit, and trusted the process," she says.

None of that was the part she struggled with. The part she struggled with was believing she was allowed to have a stable place to do it in.

For a long time, stability meant survival. "I did all these jobs, like behind a desk or in a cubicle, because I was, like, survival," she says. When she found AcademySTAY, she almost talked herself out of it. She worried she'd be taking a spot from someone who needed it more. She wasn't sure she deserved it.

Then she moved in, and something loosened.

"I've also been able to step out of survival mode just slightly," she says. She and her roommate started taking the light rail into the city just to walk around and discover it. She got back to her art. She started thinking about where she wants to land instead of just where she'd sleep. The straight A's, she'll tell you, would have happened regardless; what changed was everything around them. "It's allowed me to get in touch back with my life and my spirit, on where I'm going."

She doesn't describe AcademySTAY as a program to get through. She describes it as a place to leave from, on her own terms, when she's ready.

"This is a place that I can sprout in and leap safely onto," she says. "Safely take off and figure out where I'm gonna land."

The doubt she felt at the start, the sense of not quite deserving it, turned out to be something a lot of students carry. What finally shifted it for Myana was a line Elizabeth gave her: you are a gift to your peers. She's made it a mantra. And it's the answer she'd give someone standing where she once stood, unsure whether to walk in the door.

"The feeling is real, the danger is old," she says; a line she credits to her therapist. The fear that you'll be turned away, that you'll take something meant for someone else, that you don't belong here: that fear is real, and it once kept you safe. "It doesn't hurt anyone to come and open your mind and see what it's like."

Elizabeth means it plainly. "Her presence in this program is a gift," she says, "one that enables others with similar experiences to learn, heal, and grow simply through their conversations and interactions with her."

Before she leaves, Myana is teaching a short series of classes for the students staying behind, starting with music, because everybody here loves music and she doesn't want it to feel intimidating. She'll pull literature into a program most of these students would never otherwise cross paths with. It's exactly what she'd have wanted on her own first day: an alum, still in the building, showing what launching looks like up close.

Myana is off to UCLA where she will be a big fish in a big pond.

She isn't finished, and she'd be the first to say so. She's still learning to believe she's earned a seat at the writer's table she's aiming for. But she's clear about what this place gave her.

"You get more than an apartment," she says. "You get community. Find your footing."

A safe place to sprout, and to leap from. That's what a launch pad is for. Myana's about to prove it in Los Angeles.

For Jenny Davidson, who founded AcademySTAY, watching Myana go is the whole point.

"Watching Myana graduate from community college and head to UCLA on scholarships she earned herself reminds me that while her success is entirely the result of her resilience and hard work, building AcademySTAY has given me the privilege of creating a place where young people can believe in their future and then achieve it."

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If you'd like to learn more about AcademySTAY, visit academystay.org. If you know a young adult who might be a fit for our program, we are accepting applications at www.academystay.org/eligibility.