When I was writing my book, most of the essays fit into clear territories. Sex, love, work,

friendship. But then there are those subjects. Vague but just as essential. Death, illness,

mental health, the paranormal, right, and wrong, and good, and bad. If your brain were a pie chart,

this is the stuff that might not find a neat slice to settle itself into, but it's also the stuff

that keeps you up at night. It's impossible to explain and makes you the complex and universally

attuned individual you are. Welcome to the big picture.

I want to be a pediatrician. At the same time, I want to be a veterinarian, and then I also want

to be a painter. But I also want to be like a Guadandera, which is like a healer with like

an actual plant. But then I was also thinking of being a marine biologist maybe, or like a person

who studies like strong diseases and how to cure them.

Lupita Martinez is 11 years old. Not only does she have a lot of badass ideas about what she

wants to be when she grows up, but she's already making a huge difference in her community in

East Oakland, California. Her unofficial scouting troop, the Radical Monarchs, never even considered

selling cookies. Instead, they're forging relationships in their community in radical new ways.

One of my favorite parts of being a Radical Monarch is just building a lot of relationships with my

Radical Monarchs sister, and just learning with them is just like really fun. Hi, my name is Lupita,

and I'm in sixth grade, and I'm 11 years old, and I'm part of Radical Monarchs. Oh yeah, my mom started

the group. She was at the end of her fourth grade year, and really kind of like I saw her kind of

grappling with like issues of her own identity, like what does it mean for her to be this like young

brown girl of color. So my name is Anae Vett Martinez, and I am one of the co-founders of the Radical

Monarchs. And so I started to think about what it looked like to start a group that centered her

identity, and it still had some of the components of like scouting troops, right, where they earned badges,

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