I was the only woman in the North Atlantic Council press pool.

I was the only woman in the North Atlantic Council press pool, the only one without a giant camera rig, and somehow still the one standing closest to the President of the United States.

On the last day of the NATO Summit the head of creator partnerships for NATO pulled me aside with an offer I wasn't expecting. The North Atlantic Council meeting, where all 32 NATO heads of state and government sit down together, only had 40 press slots total, split across thousands of journalists at the summit, and one of those slots had been set aside specifically for a content creator… that slot was mine. And out of the three tiers of positioning in the room, I'd landed the best one, tier one, directly across from the President of the United States.

Before we walked over, he told me something I didn't fully appreciate until an hour later: people might try to tell me I wasn't supposed to be there, but I needed to hold my ground anyway, because I had just as much right to be in that room as anyone else standing in it. He knew exactly what he was talking about.

Walking to the meeting room, I realized I was the only woman in the entire press pool and the only person under 40. All the reporters quietly jockeyed for position the whole way, elbows and shoulders doing the negotiating. Not hauling a camera rig helped, though it didn't stop security from stopping me more than once to ask if I was really supposed to be there.

I ended up sharing a platform with the official NATO camera, ABC News, and the White House press corps. Then the leaders started filing in, and it hit me how close everything actually was: Trump, Rubio, and Hegseth maybe ten feet away, all 32 heads of state taking their seats around the table while every camera in the room, including mine, locked onto the same moment.

We only got about ten minutes before security cleared us out ahead of the classified portion, and in that stretch I watched Trump nod off during a speech in Turkish and caught the quiet side conversations happening around that table, the kind of thing you'd never catch on a broadcast feed.

I know a lot of the other press were giving me looks, the kind that make it pretty obvious what they're thinking, like how does a 24-year-old blonde girl with an iPhone end up in the tier one spot at a NATO Summit North Atlantic Council meeting. Their snide comments and side eyes didn't phase me, because I knew exactly why I was standing there.

Over 50% of Americans get their news from social media now, and my content reaches people who might not even know what NATO is, let alone what a NAC meeting entails. That is precisely the point.

That's why I was there. To break the echo chamber. To pull younger audiences into the room for one of the most important meetings happening anywhere in the world right now.