Sometimes I marvel at the young woman I was. I wonder who she was to have done what she did with such confidence (and, yes, I wasn’t really confident) and abject determination (though I doubted myself every step of the way). How did I walk into all of those strange places with all of those strange people and just claim my spot? I wrapped gusto around my shoulders like a cape and stepped into everything I feared. It felt like survival and that’s about as close as I can come to understanding where that came from.
I can look back on those times now and see how my ego rode shotgun alongside. I certainly wasn’t conceited and I didn’t have much in the way of authentic successes to draw on. I was creating myself in real time and it was all based on outrunning my