Many things that I believe to be true about myself came to me through the words of others. More than once I was called a "work horse" for my eager desire to take on additional duties and start new projects.

At first, that desire came out of sheer necessity—a need to survive both intellectually and financially. An immigrant with a Ph.D. from her native land of Russia, no work experience in the United States and a family to support, I was bored to tears in the secretarial position that I held, one that paid $25,000 a year and could not possibly feed me, my husband, and my baby. New projects gave me hope—hope to be noticed, to be promoted to a position that was less mind-numbing and more financially rewarding. I was competing for jobs with Americans, so I felt that I had to work twice as hard.

But at least there was that hope. In the Russia that I left in 1998, few could hope to get a job they could survive on. In the mid-to-late 90s, many of my friends left for the U.S., Germany, France, England, Turkey, Canada, Israel, and even Australia. Some found distant Jewish roots. Some worked in summer camps with special needs kids for a promise of a work visa. And some got married to foreigners, for better or for worse. Those who couldn't leave the country fled our town, moving to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Novosibirsk, Kiev, or Minsk.

We were lucky. We were university graduates. We had the brains and the skills that allowed us to leave. We had received free top-notch education in western history, literature and culture, earning diplomas that equaled western Master's degrees and helped us to fluently communicate and eventually fit in overseas.

* * *

Years later, when I finally felt at home in the foreign land that I fled to, I was called a writer. "You process the events of your life by writing about them," noted Carol, my former boss.

By then, we were friends and lived on opposite coasts—Carol had moved to Oregon, and I remained in Virginia. In-between monthly Skype calls, we exchanged lengthy emails narrating recent events in our lives.

Carol was a publications director in a non-profit association in Arlington, Virginia, which I joined in December 1998, after getting a work permit. Having come to the U.S. on a fiancée visa and waiting on my conditional green card after getting married, I could not be choosy. Many places would not even invite me to an interview after learning that I did not have permanent residency. And, without work, I was dying inside, sitting in a dark one-bedroom apartment across the Braddock Road metro station, getting depressed by the minute, and cooking during movie commercials on TV.

I enjoyed the movies. Back in Russia, my sister and I rented bootlegged American films, some of which were made by a viewer holding a video camera while sitting in the back of a theater, with the Russian dubbing so hasty and unprofessional (the dubbers, rumor had it, had to put clothespins on their noses to disguise their voices) that it was hard to tell which character the words belonged to. Here, I was rewatching Scent of a Woman, Dirty Dancing, Silence of the Lambs, Road House, Die Hard, The Addams Family, and The Godfather—and savoring the originals as if for the first time.

I got lucky with the non-profit. Their Communications department had just lost a Bulgarian secretary to a promotion in another department. She was obedient, pleasant and hardworking, and they decided to give another Eastern European a try.

Like Iliana, I quickly got promoted. In June 1999, a publications production manager left and I was offered her position. I was eager to take on a new challenge—and a $5,000 a year pay increase, which I really needed, with my baby girl on the way.

A year later, when a big project was taken off my plate, Carol asked me where I thought I could contribute, instead. Before I knew what I was saying, I blurted out, "I want to write."

* * *

I started writing shortly after my sister was born, in June 1982, when I was nine and a half years old. I'd already known the mechanics of writing and had a pretty good vocabulary. After all, I had learned to read at the age of three. My family lived in "kommunalka"—a two-room apartment in which the kitchen, the bathroom, and the hallway were shared with another family. There was no space for a child to run around and explore. Playing with a red-haired doll that my grandfather had brought from Germany after World War II and a yellow plush teddy bear that I received from my uncle as a birthday present quickly got old. We lived in an apartment building above a store that sold liquor, and I wasn't allowed to go outside by myself. Too many drunk men passed through the yard at all hours of the day, mom said. On TV, only ten minutes worth of children's programming was shown Monday through Friday and an hour on Saturday, so, for me, books were it. They were the entertainer, the babysitter, the educator, and the friend.

Luckily, books by famous Soviet children's authors were available in stores. But for older readers, interesting books were a rarity. Whenever popular fiction appeared, it was sold by the bookstore staff to their family and friends. Rumor had it, my uncle befriended a manager of a bookstore and traded the meat (another rarity) that he got from his mother-in-law, a manager of a grocery store, for the books. He had a beautiful collection of the works of the Dumas, Conan Doyle, Thomas Mein Reid, and Agatha Christie, which he protected like a high-security prison guard. The book spines teased his guests through the glass of the locked bookcase; no one was allowed to touch or borrow a book.

A factory engineer, my mom joined a book raffling club in her workplace, and I benefitted from her winnings. She brought home young adult fiction from Bulgarian, east German, Czech, and Polish authors. But, at best, I got a new book a month. I'd devour it in a few days and then re-read it multiple times.

My mother left my father when I was four and a half. She could not stand sharing the kommunalka with another family any longer and my father, she claimed, refused to leave his hometown. The state-owned apartments that young professionals lived in came with their jobs, and to get an apartment that wasn't shared, my parents would have had to relocate. When she remarried and my sister was born, we moved into my stepfather's apartment. In the summer, an hour of a children's movie was on TV every day, but for the first three months after Ira's birth, Mom would not turn on the TV. She believed that the magnetic waves were detrimental to the infant's brain development—not to mention, the noise from the TV would wake the baby up.

Starved for entertainment, I began writing my own books. I recalled a cartoon series about a town whose residents looked like kids but had adult jobs—a gardener, a nurse, a car mechanic, a policeman. They navigated their little society, with local dramas. As Oscar Wilde observed, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery." So the characters in my book were talking animals that assumed jobs and social roles in their tightly knit community. Vulfie the wolf was a troublemaker, and Silvia the fox was trying to set him straight. Or some such.

Without TV, my stepfather, Victor Alekseevich, who'd earned an engineering degree in Moscow, must have been starved for entertainment, as well. He had always been fascinated by Soviet educators Sukhomlinsky and Makarenko, incidentally, both Ukrainians. After the revolution of 1917, Makarenko worked with orphaned kids and teenagers who vandalized the school and then claimed they didn't know what had happened and who ignored or abused their teachers. He realized how lonely these children were and saw untapped human potential behind their aggression. He saved these orphans from a life of crime by establishing communes where they learned literacy, dignity, trust, and a trade that could feed them for life, and established soul-saving social connections.

Having lost access to his two sons in a divorce (his first wife went to live with her parents in Ukraine), Victor Alekseevich fulfilled his pedagogical aspirations by becoming my parent. In the evenings, when my mother relieved me from the duties of helping her with the baby, he began reading Pushkin's Captain's Daughter with me. We took turns reading the book, pausing to comment on the plot. After Pushkin, we read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. One summer, I cried bitter tears over Uncle Tom's Cabin, a book he recommended. He tried to teach me to draw (to no avail, I should say) and introduced me to logical puzzles, which I have loved ever since. He explained connections between historical events and taught me to add and subtract three-digit numbers in my mind, without paper, training my logic and memory.

And a year later, another inspired educator entered my life.

My fourth grade English teacher, Irina Nikolaevna Kabanova, was fresh out of university and poured her heart into her job. During her very first English lesson, she came in and spoke English. At first, I was stunned. But she made her meaning clear with gestures accompanying commands: sit down, stand up, come to the board. She showed us pictures and introduced objects in sentences: "This is a pen." "This is a pencil." "That is a table." "This is a yellow pencil." "That is a blue pencil." And there we were, starting with absolute zero, and yet already understanding and speaking some English.

In seven years of her English classes, she did not use Russian in the classroom—not once. When we became teenagers, she drew us in with the handouts she'd written by hand through carbon paper. She taught us the vocabulary of music and movie genres, city life, and sports. We hardly ever wrote in her class, but we listened, read, and talked, and talked, and talked. Only in English.

It was in fifth grade when she started giving me English books to read and had me create a glossary: a notebook where I recorded new words that I saw in the books. My memory was excellent; after writing a word out, I instantly remembered it. Irina Nikolaevna gave me no extrinsic rewards—no stars, stickers, or extra credit points. Just extra homework for a student willing to learn.

At the same time, I discovered the library. I consumed young adult novels, often forgetting the plot or the name of the characters. I was mining the contents for interesting ideas, for unusual expressions—for the words that intrigued me or made me think. From sixth grade through the end of college, I faithfully copied interesting quotes into a notebook, and I started keeping a list of the books that I have read.

In Russian literature classes, I wrote essays. Even though we largely read Russian classics that were way above our comprehension ability—and had little, if any, relevance to our lives—I enjoyed the intellectual exercise. The compositions were planned in my head, simmering in there for days. I would think about the essay topic while pushing my sister's stroller on after-school walks, and after a few days, I sat down and wrote in one sitting. The words just came out. It felt like a miracle. I didn't even know these ideas were in me; I would re-read the sentences I wrote and wonder where they'd come from.

My essays came back marked with a red "5" (an equivalent of A), but without feedback, so I didn't really know what I was doing right. My grammar and spelling were probably pretty good. Or, perhaps, the conversations with my stepfather were paying off. Or maybe I did form an original thought or two.

Most likely, though, it was the daily journal writing habit inspired by my mom. In early 1985, she gave me a handwritten journal that she kept for only one month, at a summer camp in the Crimea, and a new book, a journal written by Lev Tolstoy's daughter Tatyana. Reading the two journals made me realize that I didn't have to make up a world of Vulfies or Silvias; I could actually write about the stuff that happened every day.

Mom encouraged me to write. I was entering the challenging teen years, and, with my sister in her care, she had no time to mother me. My journal, which she could easily find in the small apartment we shared, gave her access to my thoughts, feelings, and happenings.

I got solid proof of Mom reading my journals only when I was 19—when, during an angry outburst, she mentioned something that I wrote but never shared with her. Since that moment, my journals traveled with me every day when I left the apartment.

In college we read, read, and read. For four years in foreign literature classes, we read about 70 to 100 books a year, covering all prominent names from the ancient Greeks through 20th century U.S. authors. Our university library had enough copies for every student to borrow. And in the post-Perestroika 1990s, good books began appearing in stores. They were too expensive, so we shared. Our English class—the ten students who studied together from first through fifth year—grew really close. We all pitched in and bought a book that we would give as a birthday gift to one person in the group and then would all take turns reading.

When I first entered school, a new world opened up to me. There I was, a lonely child, finally feeling that she belonged somewhere. I felt welcome in class; I could read way beyond the grade level, and Svetlana Ivanovna Sharonova, my first teacher, called me her little star. She didn't single me out; there were lots of stars in our class of 30 kids, and we were very friendly with each other. She encouraged all of us to do well and be good people. A single mother herself, she said that, as adults, we should have kids. "If all good people in the world have kids, they will raise good people. Those good people will raise more good people, and there will be more and more good people in the world," she often said.

Svetlana Ivanovna was the first adult who made me feel that I was smart—the words that I clung to with all my heart. Irina Nikolaevna complimented my analytical abilities, but never to my face. I was not praised at home—not even a little. Modesty was revered in Russia, which is something I had to grapple with during job interviews in the U.S. It took me years to figure out that I could praise myself, without betraying my cultural heritage, by citing someone else's compliments of me.

* * *

Carol was highly complimentary of my first writing attempt. When she assigned me a 2,000-word feature article on nutrient deficiencies, gave me the name of an expert in nutrition, and pointed me in the direction of PubMed, a database of medical research studies, I was thrilled. As training, she suggested that I sit in on an interview with an associate editor. I quickly noticed how she started with a list of prepared questions but then deviated from it, prodding the interviewee to reveal more, to disclose more specific details.

So I started doing just that. My interviewees didn't really need to be prodded, and Carol was pleased with my first piece. But after I turned in my third creation—a 3,000-word article on vegetarian diets—she changed huge chunks of it.

I walked into her office, slightly red in the face, and asked her why she'd made the changes. "Oh, I just cut some words here and there," she replied, smiling charmingly and flailing her hands in front of her face, as if swatting away an annoying fly.

"Well, shouldn't I be doing it?" I asked.

Ironically, in the eight years of higher education training, I did not have to take a single writing course. No one taught me how to write. I was given the mechanics and the syntax of two languages and left to my own devices. I had written several notebooks of poems, three short stories, and dozens of essays in both English and Russian. In one English class, I wrote weekly scripts for plays that our class performed. I wrote three course papers, a diploma project, and a dissertation for my Ph.D. I got feedback on the content of my research from the experts in the field, but I never had feedback on my writing. Someone rewriting what I wrote, taking over my words and ideas, was new to me—and it was painful.

Years prior, in Japan, Carol dabbled in teaching, and the desire was still alive. So once or twice a week she started reading aloud to me from Zinsser and Strunk and White. Of course, I could have read the books myself. But these sessions gave us an excuse to take a break from work and become friends. From the books, I learned to lead with the most exciting material, to form strong transitions between paragraphs, and to use vivid verbs.

I learned to edit in September 2003, when, thanks to my writing experience in the U.S. and the three years of teaching experience in my alma mater, I was hired at George Mason University to teach an evening writing class to a group of graduate students and embassy personnel. From Diana Hacker's Rules for Writers, I learned to cut out unnecessary words, check my texts for sentence variety, use parallel structure, and emphasize key ideas through independent clauses. To teach all that, I first had to learn it myself. So I did.

* * *

The written word has been central in my life. It has been my entertainer, my escape, my educator, and my close friend. And during the darkest period of my life, it saved me.

My first years in the U.S. were marked by fear, sadness, and struggle. After my daughter was born in 1999, my husband, who suffered from bipolar disorder, got fired from his job, and I became the sole breadwinner. I got a second job—an office job I did at home in the evening, after putting my baby girl to bed or with her sitting on my knees and reaching for the keyboard that I was typing on. Even with the two jobs, I could not make ends meet, and, living in the constant cycle of anxiety and depression, I could not even think of writing. I tried. I would sit in front of a blank piece of paper, but the words would not flow. I stopped sending emails to the many friends I left behind. I stopped reading.

The woman that stared back at me in the mirror was nothing like the girl that left Russia in 1998, a young professional full of promise, of potential, of dreams and ideas. The woman was dreary, depressed, and desperate. Her mind was suffocating in the life that she had to live, balancing on the edge of poverty.

And when the contract for my second job ended in December 2002, I went into panic mode. By then I'd learned that my husband couldn't hold a job for more than a few months. The salary from my remaining job paid the rent, utilities, a car loan, and help for my mother and sister. My ten credit cards, with 35% interest, were charged up to their limit with the clothes and toys for my daughter. Food had to be bought thoughtfully—within the limit of the minimum payment that I'd just paid off. Bananas were purchased at Giant on one credit card, bread and milk at Safeway on another, and noodles and tomato sauce at Shoppers on the third. And the next month, it had to be done all over again, with no end in sight.

My innate desire to write was my ultimate savior. Writing the articles assigned by Carol gave me the challenge that my mind was craving. Talking to her about writing gave me hope for a better future. And when I started teaching, I began feeling like myself again. Talking to my students in the classroom made me feel alive. I began writing journals again. The new income from the course that I taught gave me hope to get out of debt. And soon, I got another promotion, with a considerable pay bump.

* * *

I was lucky. The love of reading and the free education all the way through my Ph.D. were a gift of my motherland—a gift I have treasured like my uncle treasured his enviable collection of books. Without that gift, the dreary woman staring at me in the mirror would likely still be balancing her credit cards, hoping to make ends meet.

Many of my students do not have this privilege. Many of them come to this country, to this land of opportunity, to escape war and violence. They come yearning for education, for a chance at giving their children safety and basic human rights, for a future that is a little brighter than the one their parents had.

I know they can do it; they have the skills of resilience and resourcefulness and strong family ties. I also know that it's not easy. It's not easy to study while working and paying tuition. It's not easy to study while raising children or supporting family members. It's not easy to become an adult in a new country, without family and friends around.

I fell in love with teaching because of the kind and supportive people who have crossed my path. They helped me believe in myself. They molded me into who I am today. They taught me what I know. They made me want to make a difference in the lives of others—to pay them back in the only way I can.

This is my story. My students have their own real, painful, powerful stories to tell. Helping them tell these stories is my job, and my privilege.