Right now, close to 400,000 children in the United States are living without permanent families in the foster care system. Most of them remain in state care for two years minimum and 14 percent live in group homes.

I am currently an intern at a non-profit that provides legal services for current and former foster care kids. It has been one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. It can be so easy to forget how privileged we are or to ignore the struggles that people are facing in our own backyards. These children live in LA, right around the corner from me and you. Yet their lives are so different. Many of them get tossed from home to home, school to school, never really belonging anywhere. Most of them have witnessed abuse, drug use or neglect at a very young age. The older youth who transition out of foster care are left on their own. Things that my parents helped me with like finding housing and filing taxes, they are left to do on their own.

Every day when I go to work, I hear story after awful story and my heart breaks for these children, and every day I am reminded of how blessed I am. It is so easy for me to remain caught up in my own little college world; to think that failing a midterm is the end of the world or complain about having to take the bus everywhere. But then I remember that I am so lucky. There are so many people just in our own city that do not have place to sleep tonight. What right do I have to complain about how hard my college education is? The opportunity to go to college is an unbelievably huge blessing.

Sometimes I am tempted to fall into the horrible trap of thinking that I deserve what I have. I have the mentality of I worked hard in high school, I work hard in college, I deserve to be here. But everything I have in life was not earned; in fact, most of it was not. I was lucky enough to be born into a home with loving parents and receive a good education. I was lucky enough to grow up in the suburbs where I was sheltered from the awful things of this world. I in no way deserve the life I have. And I will never understand why I have so much and they have so little. For now, I can only be eternally grateful that I have the things that I have.