Roots in New Orleans
I was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, in a single-parent household, raised by a woman who was as kind as she was hard-working. She gave me the values I still carry today: if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all; respect other people; and, above all, how to love. Some lessons, though, she couldn't teach me. Those I had to learn on my own.
The year everything changed
Up until 2005, life was pretty normal. Then Hurricane Katrina swept away our home and scattered us. My mother got us settled into a new place with almost no help: just her, and me, her oldest, doing my part to hold things down for my younger siblings. A year later, we found our way back home. That stretch taught me what it means to step up when it counts, and to look out for the people depending on you.
Lessons that only experience can teach
Like a lot of us, I learned some of life's harder lessons the way you can't be told: by living them. I'd always assumed the people around me had my best interests at heart. Experience taught me that isn't always true. It's a difficult thing to learn, but a clarifying one: once you become an adult, the responsibility to understand what you're agreeing to is yours, and yours alone.
Why verification matters
We live in an age of endless information, some of it accurate, plenty of it not. When something turns out to be wrong, whose fault is it: the person who put it out there, or the person who accepted it without ever checking? I've come to believe the responsibility falls on each of us: to verify, to double-check, to actually read what we're about to sign up for. Because at the end of the day, it affects you and the people you care about most.