Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to work with children in the health care field. For a period of time, as a child, I would even sign my name with “pediatrician,” following it. Around the age of 12, my aunt and uncle asked if I wanted to be in the delivery room when my aunt gave birth to my future godson. I, of course was thrilled! That experience changed my professional desires. I was so impressed with the labor and delivery nurses. They were there the entire time, they were so involved, and I found their responsibilities so fun and exciting. The doctor came at the very last second, announced that his card game was disrupted (joking), caught my godson, and was gone again. This seemed extremely boring to me. Ever since that day, I knew I wanted to be a nurse. Fast forward to nursing school… I still wanted to be a labor/delivery nurse. Then, I started my psychiatric clinical rotation, and that’s when all of my goals changed. My instructor was a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner and she taught me so much about mental illness and I found it all absolutely fascinating. From that point on, I knew that’s what I wanted to do! Then I started my career as a psychiatric nurse and was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Gill, whom I continued to learn so much from, and still do to this day. I quickly realized that I wanted to further my education and wanted to prescribe medicine. In the beginning of my career, I had no idea that my future held so many hard times with family and friends who suffered from mental illness and addiction, some of which lost their lives. And going through these hard times was what made me realize mental illness and addiction do not discriminate. At one point in my life, I think I may have been naïve enough to believe that only people who come from abusive families, who lived in bad neighborhoods, the homeless, etc. were affected by mental illness and addiction. However, I learned that mental illness and addiction happens everywhere and to anyone, regardless of age, gender, race, culture, and socioeconomic status. So even though I found this profession fascinating at first, it became something very close to my heart. It has affected some of my loved ones to a deep extent and it’s caused strain and heartache on my family at times. And although not everyone had the outcome that I would have liked, I have been thankful every day that I chose this profession, for having the knowledge to help those that were accepting of it, and for having met some wonderful professionals along the way that continue to extend their knowledge to me.