My name is Liesel Allen, but I'm also regularly confused with my identical twin sister, Gwyneth. My parents also often run through my four younger sibling's names before saying mine. My siblings are my best friends, and my sisters are my confidantes. My family uses humour to get through trials, specifically, the challenges my autistic brother Wells and my own disabilities create. I was born with an ulnar deficiency, hip dysplasia, tethered cord syndrome, leg length discrepancy, scoliosis and a neurogenic bladder.
I am a senior at Loudoun County High School (LCHS) in Leesburg, Virginia, but from ninth to eleventh grade I attended The International School of Kuala Lumpur (ISKL) in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I have been on a varsity swim team for three years, and enjoy rock climbing, public speaking, and writing prose and poetry.
My career and education goals are based on my experiences overseas in Malaysia. I've spoken at multiple conferences, including TEDx, about ableism and the idea that disabilities spark creativity. Inspired by my autistic brother Wells, in college, I want to continue to spread disability awareness through work in international relations and development, with an emphasis on education in countries that lack resources for disabled children. I plan on attending Brigham Young University fall of 2017.

Essay: Music Therapy

Music Therapy is the clinical use of music to help the physical, emotional, and cognitive needs of patients. Creating opportunities for people to gain access to music therapy will make an incredible difference as people will be able to stabilize their emotions and their emotional well-being won't hinder their life.
Music stimulates brain waves. Because music is so malleable it is a medium that can be adapted to meet individual needs. Stronger rhythms make people more alert, while in contrast slower, calmer music helps patients relax. The latter helps people develop a positive state of mind. Individuals with autism are good at detecting the pitch in musical tones. The variation in the tones of a pitch distinguishes between happy and sad emotions. Through this, music therapy is used to reduce the emotional deficits associated with autism. It creates a path in which an autistic person can communicate their emotions through tonal pitch differentiation. Music therapy is imperative for helping to provide communication for nonverbal people and stimulating cognitive function to remedy speech and language skills. Being able to communicate emotionally could greatly increase the quality of life for autistic children as they can communicate to their family their wants and needs with the help of music therapy. I have seen the technique work firsthand in my family, as my younger brother Wells, diagnosed with autism at age four, listens to a music therapy program that helps calm him and allows him to stabilize and process his emotions.
Music therapy also takes people's mind off of physical pain. I was born with a leg length discrepancy, causing all the bones in my left leg to be shorter than my right. Until sixth grade, I was stuck with a permanent hand-on-hip, leg-jutting-out attitude stance. I underwent a surgery where my left femur was broken and held together by an external fixator with seven metal pins sticking out of my bone. During the six-month process of stretching my femur through this external fixator frame, my thigh muscles were constantly taut as I groaned my way through physical therapy three torturous times a day to straighten and bend my knee. 135° was amazing. 90° was impossible. To make persevering through physical therapy more manageable, I listened to classical music specifically tuned to calm and relax emotions. As I listened to this playlist, I could relax, and in turn, my muscles would relax and I gained more mobility in my left knee.
The benefits of musical therapy can be applied to a diverse range of patients and problems. Increasing the awareness and application of music therapy will help increase the standard of living for a broad range of people, from autistic patients to people undergoing physical therapy. Music therapy should be a common treatment to help stabilize emotions so as to create a better life.