A Voice for the Voiceless: One Girl and the Power of Kindness
A few months ago, Michelle Carpinteyro was at an ROTC competition with her high school’s team. She and her friends were sitting at the lunch table, laughing, enjoying their meal, and getting ready to leave. As her friends rushed to return to the event, she stopped.
She noticed a boy on her team sitting by himself. This boy, she says, usually sat alone. She waited for him. As her friends continued to rush her, she put her foot down.
“I told them I wasn’t leaving until he was ready to leave with us,” she recalls.
Staying behind didn’t take much effort on Carpinteyro’s part. To many, the gesture seems quite small. But Carpinteyro reveals that months later the boy spoke to her again, thanking her for that simple act of kindness and nearly bringing Carpinteyro to tears.
This isn’t the only example of Carpinteyro using friendliness and kindness to positively impact someone. She says she makes it her mission to not let anyone sit alone, citing her past struggles with loneliness as the propeller.
“I wasn’t the most popular in middle school,” she says with a laugh.
Carpinteyro’s kindness extends beyond her day-to-day life as well. Not yet sure about her future, all of her potential career interests are consistent in one way — they reflect her desire to help people. Whether it’s criminal justice, journalism, or working for Child Protective Services (CPS), she knows the importance of being there for the people who need it most.
“Kids don’t have a voice. I want to be the voice that they don’t have,” says Michelle, when asked about why she wants to work for CPS.
Carpinteyro seems like just a regular teenage girl on the outside. In many ways, she is: she’s soft-spoken, she likes pop music and superhero movies, and she likes taking pictures and hanging out with her friends.
But behind the shy smile and the ordinary exterior is a girl with a genuine passion for humanity. She is a girl who makes kindness and compassion a priority, and that makes her someone all of us can learn a lesson from.
