Vermont Conversation: From homelessness to Harvard

The Vermont Dialog with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that options in-depth interviews on native and nationwide points with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and residents who’re making a distinction. Hear beneath, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify to listen to extra.

Emi Nietfeld was like many highschool seniors, dutifully filling out school purposes. However not like most different candidates, she was attempting to get into an Ivy League college whereas writing school essays within the entrance seat of her Toyota Corolla, the place she was residing.

Nietfeld’s household fell aside when her mom, who was a hoarder, couldn’t take care of her and put Emi on anti-psychotic treatment fairly than confront her personal psychological sickness. Nietfeld’s different father or mother got here out as transgender and disappeared from her life. By means of a tumultuous childhood that included homelessness, foster care, consuming issues, suicide makes an attempt, abuse and sexual assault, Nietfeld one way or the other stored her dream alive of attending a prime school. She dreamed that it might be her ticket out of distress. She finally attended Harvard and later labored at Google as a software program engineer. She left Google after being sexually harassed by a supervisor, which she wrote about in an op-ed for the New York Occasions.

Nietfeld — now 29, fortunately married and writing full time — survived towards all odds. However she rejects the simple label of an “overcomer.” She desires her story to spotlight the plight of others like her: 1 in 10 younger adults expertise homelessness, and LGBTQ+ youth have twice the danger of being unhoused.

Nietfeld has a brand new guide, “Acceptance,” which the New York Occasions describes as “a exceptional memoir” and “an in depth critique of the American fantasy that poverty, sickness or some other adversity could be conquered by means of sheer grit and bootstrapping ingenuity.”

“As an alternative of constructing a life that may redeem the previous — an inconceivable feat — I sought out a life that I might reside with,” Nietfeld wrote. “For the primary time, I felt fortunate for the little issues: to get up within the morning in my very own mattress, to eat breakfast, to do my work. It was not so vital to me to attain one thing nice, as a result of I used to be glad to be alive, which had appeared inconceivable and tenuous.”