She took classes slowly, while working forty hours a week at a sports bar, serving beer and burgers to the late-night crowd. Nothing fit quite like the feel of welding iron. At first, the idea of spitting fire at metal seemed like hot, heavy work. But despite her reservations, she’d loved it, and had taken more classes, choosing metal sculpture for her senior project, a depiction of inner self using an outer medium. She chose to make a full-body sculpture of herself as an old woman, using reclaimed metal. She wanted to show not who she was in her current state, but who she would be. It took her months just to find the pieces of metal she wanted to work with, scouring junkyards and old construction sites. She hoarded scrap metal for months, stacking it against the wall in her bedroom.

When it was finally time to start working, she sketched drawings of herself as she thought she’d be in fifty years. Nothing was working, and she couldn’t get it right until one day she realized that she needed to go deeper than skin. She stripped her sculpture of its topical flesh and started making a figure out of muscle. She hadn’t wanted to make something beautiful, as so many of her classmates had; rather, she wanted to make something so ugly it was a warning. At the end of a grueling ten months of work, Rainy submitted her piece: a five-foot-five statue of her seventy-year-old self, her back rigidly straight, but the muscles on her arms sagging low in hammocks of flesh as she gripped a walking stick that looked like a baseball bat.

Her senior project made it into the school’s yearly art show and a reporter was there to do a write-up. He’d interviewed her and asked to take a photo of her standing next to her work; when she’d refused to be in the photo, he’d taken one of her hand touching the hand of the sculpture instead. He called the piece A Millennial View of Self and put the photo of Rainy’s hand reaching for her sculptures alongside the article.