What ultimately saved me was the willingness of one man, who happened to be a college-admissions officer, to see me as a person — not as a subpar transcript or a series of boxes left unticked but as a complicated human who’d had very few opportunities and a lot of bad luck and who had made a series of regrettable decisions but might make something of her life nonetheless.

Three months after my expulsion, I was kicked out of my parents’ house. For the next three years, I stumbled through…