Ten years ago I was in middle school. Ten years ago I was too afraid to raise my hand in class. If I answered incorrectly, surely I'd become fodder for lunchtime gossip. My hair was unfortunate. My eyebrows uncontrollable. My teeth married to metal braces.

I would have loved nothing more than to be invisible and let others do the leading. I could exist in quiet ambivalence and never draw attention to myself. But somehow I shed my uneasy skin and blossomed into someone more willing to be heard. I don't know how it happened; it was really a long process. Discovering a tweezer helped. So did removing the braces. Once I went to college I forced myself to initiate conversations even though that was the very thing I hated doing. And now I am a journalist. I never saw it coming.

I fell into an internship at a TV station. At first everything felt all wrong. What was I doing here? My hair wasn't a straight bob, and everyone knows that's what you need to be on television. Somehow, though, I learned. Things began to make sense. Many days I felt like a complete moron with no direction, like everyone was laughing at me; but things are getting easier. I feel like I'm good at something, and all my life I've just wanted to be good at something. I feel like I've dusted off and polished a part of myself that has been hiding for years--hiding underneath frizzy curls and a fear of public speaking. I'm on a path I never thought I'd be on, a path I'm not familiar with, and there's something crazy and beautiful about not knowing, about not having a plan when I've always had one before. It's terrifying. I must learn to love it.