I became a published poet in elementary school and a Harvard College Book Award Winner in my senior year of high school. But achievement has a way of masking pain, and so I made winning my way of escaping. I have enough family trauma to write a whole award-winning Netflix series, and unfortunately, lots of high performers do. I didn't come from privilege—I came from food stamps and an emotionally and psychologically abusive environment that taught me survival meant high performance is mandatory and silence is required. My six-person family survived on government assistance, counting every dollar and stretching every meal. When that wasn't enough, we moved in with my aunt and cousins—eight people in a two-bedroom home, sleeping on floors, sharing everything because there was nothing else to share. But here's the thing about rock bottom: it either breaks you or it builds something unbreakable. While working 30 hours a week as a Starbucks barista and maintaining straight A's in college, I was already plotting my escape route. I wasn't just surviving—I was strategizing.