South El Monte High School is full of great possibilities, and is filled with overachieving students who worked hard to achieve success, which is what you would think if you only looked at the school newspaper or the many Instagram accounts that fill the app. However, as always, the truth is more complicated than that, and the average student is one you will never see on any of these platforms, one who struggles, who has their quirks, but ultimately is not immune to failure. Today, I bring to you my friend Julian Carlos, a student who deserves just as much spotlight as anyone else, but someone you will sadly never have seen in the spotlight until now. Julian Carlos is a student who suffered, and on paper might seem like a write-off, but is a man who overcame his own obstacles of being bullied, struggles with personal identity, and not fitting in. Julian’s life has been guided by his mother, who has shown him courage, strength, and resilience, but also someone who can’t live his life. Julian hasn’t had great grades and sometimes has failed classes, but each time he climbed out of them and became stronger, a boy made a man who is now off to live his life on his terms, ready for what the world brings to him.

You might see success in high school as getting straight A’s and a full-ride scholarship to a top university, but for me, it’s someone who is unrelenting in their quest to become better, who fails, but each time learns from it and tries to be better than they were yesterday. Julian is what I would call a success, a man who struggled hard and failed worse than anyone, but ultimately overcame his failures and always learned from them to become better; that is success. When I asked Julian to describe himself in three words, he said: “careless, hopeless, and clever.” One statement of his is for sure true: Julian is very clever, often making perfectly timed comebacks that are so good you can’t do anything but laugh. He’s so clever that he makes everyone smile around him. However, his claim of being hopeless and careless may have been true at some point, but was continuously proven wrong in our interview. When I asked about his high school journey and how he’s changed from freshman year to now, he stated, “My freshman year, I used to get bullied a lot because I was fat…so I took a wrong route and started acting tough and kind of a gangster member like so I can get at least a little bit of respect, but then I realized that, that wasn’t a very good idea, so I became my true self and started just being me.” From that statement, you may see a careless person, but definitely not a hopeless person, because I see a man who saw mistakes and decided to take the biggest risk, just being himself. When I asked about challenges he faced in high school, like any kid, he talked about being so focused on girls and how that took over his personal goals. When I asked about his future, he talked about moving to Seattle with his brother and joining the Marine Corps. However, the most striking thing that he said is something that counters his statement of hopelessness. When I asked him about his dream, he said his dream was to fly, he wants to fly jets, and what I see is a hope to soar above the world of human-filled complications and just live on his own terms. The dream every kid has is the one that leaves Julian with hope. The hope to fly, and that is what Julian will do, fly to his dream, no matter how much turbulence he has. So when I think about South El Monte High School, I don’t just think about the director of club affairs or even the president of ASB; my mind will forever go to people like Julian Carlos, a man who fails but is ultimately unrelenting in his quest to become better, because that is SEMHS, that’s who deserves the spotlight, and that’s my friend.