My Family And I Were Trapped In A Financial Prison. Then I Received A 6-Word Letter That Changed My Life.

Growing up in Belgium, I watched my mother leave for work at dawn every day to clean offices. She’d return home late, exhausted, and tell me about her day — the professors whose offices she cleaned often didn’t even acknowledge her presence. For them, she was the invisible person who emptied their trash. It was that invisibility that I vowed to escape. As a child, I didn’t know exactly how I would do it, but I knew that education was my way out.

That realization crystallized on a Sunday when I was just 11 years old. I stood in my mother’s bedroom, watching the smoke swirl from her cigarette as she sat immersed in one of the many classic novels she read on her days off. It was at that moment, as I gazed at her and the literary world she was trying to escape into that I made a promise to myself: I would break this cycle. I would rise above the generational poverty that had weighed on my family for as long as I could remember.

A few years later, my mother found love and remarried. We moved from Belgium to a small town on Cape Cod, where my stepfather lived. That move was life-changing for me. In this idyllic American town, I tasted freedom for the first time. I’ll never forget the feeling of buying my first bicycle, a pink Schwinn, with the $187.50 saved from my job at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. The bike symbolized so much more than just a mode of transportation — it represented independence, a belief that I could chart my own path in life.

Guided by my stepfather’s best friend, a high school teacher who took me under her wing, I excelled academically. I set my sights high, applying to elite universities, and was thrilled when I was accepted to Georgetown for undergrad. Later, I would go on to earn two