The first time someone suggested Heidi Sloan run for U.S. Congress, she laughed at them.

She is, by her own admission, terrible at talking about herself. (This isn’t a backhanded compliment as much as a frustrating fact for the reporter assigned to write a profile about her.)

Sloan is running in the Democratic primary in Texas’s 25th Congressional District, which zags north from Austin toward Dallas and Fort Worth. The jagged district is the result of Texas Republicans’ redrawing the state’s maps a decade ago. In 2012, a federal court ruled that the new district maps discriminated against people of color.

“It is literally like if you took a mirror and you slammed it with a hammer, and then you had shattered pieces running in all directions,” Sloan says of her district. “Clearly it is gerrymandered to disenfranchise Austin voters. But as we know, things in Texas are changing rapidly, and folks are being pushed from urban areas to more suburban areas, from suburban areas to more rural areas. And so the demographics are a little bit less predictable than I think the Republican Party, which drew all of the lines initially, thought that they were.”

Sloan grew up in the Dallas area, where her dad worked as a pizza delivery man, then drove an 18-wheeler, and then had a more stable job with a phone company. She has a hard time coming to terms with the idea that people might relate to her personal story. Sloan's instinct is to center other people’s experiences, not her own. So it’s hard to reconcile that with seeing your face on campaign signs, and dispatching volunteers to tell people who you are and why they should vote for you.

“It is hard to have my name out there, rather than being able to say, you know, this is a campaign for housing justice and for health care. This is a campaign to break the broken criminal justice system,” she says. “But in electoral politics, you have to have a name.”

What Sloan is comfortable talking about are the people she has spent her adult life working with — the chronically underserved people in her community. While attending college in Waco, Texas, she started working in a computer lab at a community center for low-income people, some of whom had unmet mental health needs. But she told herself the job was just a “blip on the radar,” and that after graduation she’d find a new career path that wasn't so entwined with her personal history.

After graduating from Baylor University, Sloan moved to Austin and took a job at a childcare center, where she spent several years working in an integrated preschool program for children with disabilities.

She loved her job, but told herself that it wasn’t who she is; she wanted to become a farmer. Ultimately she ended up at a nonprofit called Mobile Loaves & Fishes, which works with Austin’s homeless population. For the past eight years, Sloan has worked alongside people who, she says, have slept underneath bridges or at shelters for at least a year; in the cases of people she describes as “most of her friends,” it's been 5, 10, or 20 years.

By 2016, four years into her job leading the farming program at Mobile Loaves & Fishes, Sloan says she had lost friends to the prison system; to an inability to piece their lives back together after being incarcerated; to drug use to cope with the sedimentary trauma of their lives. At times, the grief became too much to deal with, but the losses crystallized something inside of her.