In 'Southern Youth,' I explore my tumultuous relationship with my childhood in poor rural Oklahoma neighborhoods. The work depicts memory as both dreamlike and unsettling in its fallibility. Through digital creation, I manipulate moments using color, composition, lighting, and texture to convey the emotional residue these spaces have left behind. This project represents my complex journey with nostalgia—an initial longing to return that quickly transforms into repulsion when confronted with the impossibility of revisiting the past. The glow-in-the-dark stars throughout the series symbolize what I yearned for but never experienced as a child. Through the physical process of pinning these works to the wall, I process my grief for a lost youth.