From Plastic Badge to Sergeant: A Journey Forged in Grit
I still remember the way that oversized blue costume drooped past my knees and how the cheap plastic badge dug into my chest. I was five. It was Halloween. And I was absolutely certain I’d grow up to be a police officer—fueled by the kind of fierce, unshakable belief only children can muster.
No one believed me. “She’ll want to be a princess next year,” Aunt Cici laughed. But I never did. Not when the other girls traded handcuffs for tiaras. Not when the boys at school said I was “too soft.” I held the line.
I paid my way through the academy working graveyard shifts at a greasy, half-forgotten diner. Most mornings I dragged myself home, soaked socks squishing in tired shoes, aching in every joint—pausing just long enough to look at that plastic badge, now taped to my mirror. My reminder. My promise.
My first solo traffic stop left me breathless. Then came the harder calls—overdoses, domestic violence, a hostage situation that still follows me into sleep. But I didn’t back down. I stayed. I endured.
Last week, I was promoted to sergeant.
On my desk sat a small box. Inside it was my childhood badge—bent, scratched, and still somehow whole. My dad had saved it all these years. I didn’t cry from pride. I cried because that little girl in the costume had always believed I’d make it, and somehow… she was right.
But I almost didn’t. The night before my academy final, running on no sleep and stiff from a 12-hour shift, I was ready to give up. My friend Trina texted me:
“You didn’t come this far to give up.”
That single sentence carried me through.
Two years later, I found a missing boy. The department left my name off the story. Politics, they said.
That night, I took the plastic badge down from my mirror. Not in defeat. In peace. Because I had become everything it once promised I could be.
