Selfish waste; I was raised at the beach, it’s what happens when you have a mom who is obsessed with fishing. She says it’s calming. Every summer as soon as school ended we would go down to my Aunts in california, it was my favorite place to be. I fell in love with surfing. It was the only thing I woke up for in the morning. I wasn’t the best at it but I improved with every passing second just excited to learn and do new tricks. I had a group of friends as well. We were young but always in trouble. All we did was surf all day and all night, we were wet more than we were dry. Realizing how strong my love for the ocean was I got more into it, not surfing but the life inside, knowing that there was life hundreds of feet below the surface was fascinating to me. Voicing my last goodbyes to my friends before traveling back to Ohio was always hard, but not being steps away from the ocean was harder. Coming back to Ohio was like leaving my life behind. In my room hours would pass where I’d find myself looking at pictures and videos from just weeks before. I never got used to that feeling of being away from the ocean, but I pushed myself to be creative and to find other ways to fill the void. Searching hours on instagram pinterest, youtube looking for tricks to maybe try next year but that’s not always what I came across. Being young I never really knew what I was looking at, these pictures and videos of trash in the ocean. And I was far too naive to think that it was something that was real. Photoshop, I deemed it almost immediately every time. But I still watched the videos, why wouldn’t I. I fell down this rabbit hole of pictures and videos fascinated by what humans did to the only planet we have.