She steps in when someone’s treated unfairly

“I’m all about justice. If I see something that’s unfair, I feel like I need to make it right.

“In high school, there was this girl who was autistic. Not a lot of people knew it. They just thought she was some weirdo. I was a senior, and she was a freshman or sophomore. She was a skinny little thing, maybe 4-foot-10.

“One day at lunch, these guys threw her tray of food on the floor because she sat at their table. I got in their faces. I told them they shouldn’t be acting like that toward people, regardless of their situation in life. The principal got involved. He thanked me for sticking up for the girl, and the other two students got sent to in-school suspension.

“Then last year around Thanksgiving at the grocery store where I work, I tried to stand up for a co-worker. She’s a very nice person who never raises her voice, and she was getting yelled at by a customer. She’s about 5-foot-2, and this guy was about 6 foot and twice her size in weight.

“She was stocking sausages, and she had a pallet of stuff out there. He was complaining that he couldn’t reach the product that he wanted. He didn’t say, excuse me. He just got mad and started yelling at her. I saw it, and I stepped in. I got yelled at, too, so I yelled back. I kind of told him that she did nothing wrong. I ended up getting in trouble. I got written up for not following procedures.

“I try to treat everybody with kindness. If it doesn’t happen, and I go a little bit too far and act out of character, it’s probably for a good reason. I guess it’s because I’ve been wronged so many times in my own life. When there was no one there to stand up for me, I know what it was like to feel powerless and feel like nobody had my back. So I try to be that person for other people.”