On the outside, I was a diligent journalism student at The New School who got dressed up every day and maintained a 3.8 GPA.

On the inside, I was still harboring a scared little girl who was terrified she might never see her parents again after school, constantly battling fear, paranoia, and panic.

I kept moving me forward, though, and one of the things that kept me going was writing. I had worked for our local newspaper as an intern during my freshman year, and in 2008, its new editor, James, asked me if I’d be interested in being a paid part-time reporter. He had been especially intrigued by my story on a local teacher who’d won a special award—I didn’t know until I got there to interview him that this teacher, who worked at one of the toughest schools in the city, was blind, and had spent most of his life with only one arm.

For my first official assignment, James sent me to the New York City Rescue Mission, a homeless shelter and recovery program down on Canal Street that was looking to raise money to build additional floors and make room for more people. I kept going back to write stories anchored in various occasions in the years that followed; I loved interviewing the men about their families, their experiences, the desire to start over. One day, the time came to write a story about the shelter reaching their goal and getting ready to add that second floor. They told me that many of the donations that came in were from people who had read my articles.

Upon graduating college I continued to pursue both my own recovery from PTSD and my career in journalism with fierce ambition and determination. I wrote for every outlet that would have me on any topic they wanted. At the same time, I wrote as an unpaid contributor to Forbes and Huffington Post because they were the only publications allowing me to write about nonprofits, social good, and inspirational people, and that was the most important thing in the world to me. In telling stories of resilience, kindness, and hope, I found joy and excitement, especially because I was able to share those positive and meaningful stories with the world, a world that was still, at times, very dark. In this form of storytelling, I had found my calling.