It was 2 a.m. and I was ten hours deep into cramming for the college algebra final I'd be taking first thing the next morning. I was sitting with one of my best friends, the boy I met my sophomore year of high school who helped me survive math classes from that year forward. "I have a 70% in this class," I told him. "There's no way I'm going to be able to do well enough on the final to even pass." "I think you'd be surprised," he told me, half talking me down and half working on what I assumed was his own homework. Two minutes later, he showed me what he'd been working on. "I calculated what you need to get to raise your grade enough to pass this class, and you need an 81," he told me. "You can do that. I've never known you to give up. You're too resilient ." Those words have been stuck in my head forever. It was freezing cold in the corner of his dorm room, the clock read 2:39 a.m., and still nothing...
Welcome to the stories that have made and continue to make me who I am.