Since I was a girl, I have always loved helping people. I grew up going back and forth about what I wanted to do with my life, dreaming about being a social worker, nurse, counselor, teacher, and pretty much anything else that involved making a difference. While I loved helping other people, I was never confident enough to ask for help myself. I struggled to keep up with math and science in school, but always excelled at reading and writing. After losing my dad to cancer in 7th grade, school became a daily chore for me to suffer through. I didn’t see the point in learning about the world when my world had been crushed. The next year, my 8th grade English teacher was teaching a unit on poetry. I remember reading a poem that struck me so hard, it brought color back into my world again. At that moment, I decided to turn to writing and created a poem about my life and the mess that I was. When my teacher read it, she cried and asked if she could submit it to a writing contest. I was comple...