By Anna Meyer

This 14-year-old girl from West High is very versatile. Whether it’s arts and crafts, playing the piano and bass guitar, thrifting or learning about death positivity, Laura Nelson ’23 has done it. 

Music is a real passion for Nelson. Playing the piano, which she started in second grade, taught her a lesson for life. She always used to compare herself to the other kids and therefore feel bad about her ability, but after some time she realized something. 

“I was saying that I’m not good enough, based on that other people were better than me. Someone is always going to be better at something,” Nelson said. “It doesn’t mean that you should stop trying. It’s more about what you like and what you care about.” 

She also played the bass guitar in north-west jazz band and is going to the tryouts for Wests jazz band, she really enjoys that. 

Another thing Nelson enjoys doing outside of school is arts and crafts. She just recently made a beat curtain for which she made 2000 beats out of old newspaper. “ I like the concept of turning something old and useless into something new and useful. That’s why I also like thrifting.” Nelson explained. 

Other than crafts, thrifting, and music, Nelson is not just interested in one big thing, she “like[s] a lot of small things for a while and then [she] find[s] something new.” One of those things she finds very interesting is the death positivity movement or the ‘Order of the good death’ which is a movement that wants death not to be a taboo topic and that tries to better the rights for deceased people and extending and trying to legalize the variety of burial possibilities. She held a presentation in a class about this and realized that a lot of people were really uncomfortable being confronted by death which just underlined the importance of this movement in Nelson’s opinion. “Our culture is pretty death phobic in the US. […] The phobia just makes people more uncomfortable and scared of it.” Nelson said.

“When most people are like ‘oh, this is my favorite thing’ […] I’ll get interested in a lot of smaller things and I’ll remain interested in them but I’ll also move on to something new.” Nelson is still unsure of what her next ‘small thing’ is but she is always looking for something interesting.