I was born on March 31st, 1998 in Charlottesville, Virginia. My parents were rather well-off, having owned a construction company for several years before I came along. That business, of course, only lasted as long as the economy did before the Great Recession. And after that, they bought a company called BiblioPlan, writing and selling history books for Christian homeschool families. 

Now, I was homeschooled for most of my childhood, and since my mom had about a decade’s experience as an actual, qualified teacher, I scraped by with a decent education, unlike many of my peers in the homeschooling community. My mother taught at and enrolled me in a kind of private school for homeschooled kids called a co-op. It was an odd little world, to say the least. We didn’t have a building of our own—a local church lent us access to their facilities—so it wasn’t until I was fourteen years old that I set foot in a real classroom. 

You can’t homeschool forever, so I eventually moved on to the next step that most of the kids in my co-op took; I enrolled in Piedmont Virginia Community College. I can’t complain about my education there, since most of my teachers had at least half an idea of what to do. But a fourteen-year-old closeted trans girl in a community college is quite a lonely kid, so the only friends I had (outside of Scouts and the theater group I played with) were middle-aged men with greying hair and sour faces. 

And it was through all these changes in my life that my parents decided to take a huge leap in their lives. They went to a website called Reece’s Rainbow, took one look at a little orphan boy named Aaron, and fell in love. When I was about thirteen, my mom, my dad, and I flew out to Ukraine for ten days to meet Aaron. You can read more about this particular journey over here, but in essence, I witnessed a series of severe human rights violations. See, the orphanage was built to contain and isolate children with physical and mental disabilities from the general population. By all rights, it was a concentration camp. After seeing that, my parents decided they couldn’t live with the guilt of leaving those children alone in such disgusting conditions, and have since dedicated a large part of their lives to raising awareness of this issue. We’ve gone on to adopt two other children, John and Mary, into our family.

At eighteen, I finally graduated from Piedmont with a degree in Computer Science. In the end, I transferred to James Madison University, where I started studying Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communications. I graduated in May 2020, and from there, I’ve set out to try my hand in the professional world, away from the nurturing hands of BiblioPlan. And of course, I’ve done a bunch of semi-impressive stuff here and there that I could brag about, but if we’re being honest, I’m just kind of a normal person who exists out in the world, doing her own thing, starting a family, running a business. I coach a youth soccer team, I run a D&D game every week, I make dinners, work from home, snuggle my cats. What more could you want?

So far, I’ve lived a dense life full of joy and sadness, isolation, and self-discovery. It’s hard to summarize and not feel like I’m leaving things out, but I’m not interested in writing an autobiography. But hey, you read this much, so congrats! 

—Ellie Nalle