My story of resilience began on April 17th, 1981. I was born to a 15-year-old, unwed mother. She and I were abandoned by my biological father when I was an infant. My mother didn’t finish high school, struggled with alcoholism and was often unemployed or underemployed during my childhood. You might imagine the challenges I encountered as a child due to these circumstances. What you’re imagining is probably accurate. I’ll spare the details because that is not the defining part of my story. This is the defining part of my story: I did not allow myself to become a victim of the circumstance I was born into. The struggles of growing up in poverty and dysfunction and growing up with an alcoholic mother—these things didn’t tear me down or cause me defeat. As I endured these experiences, an inner sense of resilience was sparked within me. These experiences provided me with a vision of what I did not want my life to become. So, I set my sights on something that I knew would change the course of my life, and that something was earning a college degree.
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I was the first person in my family to attend college, so you might imagine that I struggled at times navigating through college without guidance from anyone. I stumbled at times along the way but was fortunate to always regain focus when I thought about how far I had come. In 2004, five years after beginning, I earned a bachelor’s degree and became the first person in my family to graduate from
I was the first person in my family to attend college, so you might imagine that I struggled at times navigating through college without guidance from anyone. I stumbled at times along the way but was fortunate to always regain focus when I thought about how far I had come. In 2004, five years after beginning, I earned a bachelor’s degree and became the first person in my family to graduate from