Note: M requested anonymity for this article

I was a kid when I first crossed paths with M but not an actual kid; I was 17 and the summer between junior and senior year of high school was winding down, and man was I addicted to Twitter. I spend too much time on it now, but it was worse in high school—some perspective, I won ‘most addicted to social media’ in senior superlatives.

M ran an anonymous Twitter account that aimed to spread positivity across our high school. Students would message M compliments about other students, then she would anonymously tweet them. The idea was that this would trigger a chain reaction of positivity and love across the whole school. It was that night, when I first found out about the account and ran through all the tweets, that my life changed forever. I realized that I had so much internalized pain and anger and it was tearing me apart. I realized that it didn’t have to be like this. I realized the immense capacity for love that dwells within each and every one of us. The Twitter account took off; for that one year, she made our school a better place.

At some point, M reached out to me and revealed her identity. We hardly talked in person but we texted. I got to know her well enough: her relationship with biological her dad was rocky, but her incredible mother got away from that and married her step-dad when she was a little girl and M now has a healthy family. “I grew up with a fully committed mother, my heart and rock. She put me first… I was so blessed to have a mother and step-dad who treated and acted like a true father.” She moved all around the country, made friends and lost them, and ended up in Greensboro for high school.

With her profound and indiscriminate love, I figured everything in M’s life was perfect. Then she told me of what had happened to her.

The previous year, she had gone to a party. The house was hazy and dark, and she recalls taking three shots, maybe more. “Next thing I really remember, and the thing I withheld when I told people, was this moment when I became aware of what was happening. I had this guy on top of me and I originally didn’t know who, I didn’t know for how long, and I didn’t remember getting to that point in time. I was a virgin and proud, so during this moment I literally froze. It was like my mind came around but my body was stuck in this moment and I couldn’t move.”

I know this article has been all about love and positivity so far, but when she told me that, the first thing I felt was this unstoppable rage that consumed my being. I saw red. I wanted revenge; sometimes, I still find myself fantasizing about beating him up.

The second thing I felt was suffocating pessimism. How? How could someone do that? M, she’s the best kind of person, the kind of person who will do anything and everything she can to make this awful world a better place, even at her own expense. And how could someone break her like that? When she told me, I lost some faith in humanity; that faith I will never get back.

M went through hell for a long time after that night. She confided in her mom and a family friend, but she was anguished. “It has taken me so many meditation sessions, therapy sessions and nightmares to fully remember what happened and understand why I reacted the way I did. Feeling helpless and weak was something I already didn’t do well with from experiences with my biological dad, so knowing that I woke up while someone was using my body and I didn’t do anything…that was the ultimate pain.”

But M is as tough as she is compassionate. Some time later, M was listening to a sexual assault advocate speak about becoming a survivor instead of a victim. The moment that she became a survivor was not obvious but it was a new beginning. "It’s when I found myself able to channel my hurt and anger into realizing how strong I was for going through that. And that strength has helped me be so open about my experience and to want to help other people that have been through it. It is alienating and that part is inevitable, but this shift in thought and power is empowering and helps you move on."

Now, she has found quite the life for herself, and her boyfriend has supported her through every step of the way. “As cliché as it sounds, he reassures me every day that real men are out there. Respectful, intelligent, compassionate men. He has rebuilt my self-confidence by just allowing me to completely open up without judgment.”

In her freshman year, she took an anthropology course that changed her life: “It changed my outlook on the world, I no longer looked at people individually… but rather what made people the way they were and their interactions with others. I learned so much about different cultures around the world.” Endlessly empathetic, M understands people on a deeper level than anyone I have ever met. It keeps her up at night; I understand this. Well past midnight, I think of how many hopelessly impoverished people there are who will never get a fair chance, who do not have enough food, enough medicine, enough water. It’s a blessing and a curse.

But M wants to see change: she went to D.C. to protest in the Women’s March. And M, now a junior in college, is president of a student organization that aims to communicate via video conferencing with students from other universities across the world, from Japan to Poland to Nigeria. “It is focused to improve cross-cultural competency, understanding, and communication. It’s too late to reverse globalization so we have to know how to critically think and effectively communicate with a wide variety of cultures.”

With high school now far behind us, I’ve become great friends with M. Whenever we speak, I am always astounded by her courage, compassion, and strength. I am so proud of her; to go from where she was to where she is now is a testament to the might of human willpower. She is one of my heroes and she inspires me to be a better person than I was the day before, to treat others with respect, to find a way to navigate through all the darkness and demons that lay before us and within us. Thank you for helping me, M.