(almost) everything you need to know about me

                I was born the day before Halloween. My mother likes to say she was going to demand a C- section if I didn’t come by nightfall. She didn’t want me born a second past midnight, fearing being born on All Hallows Eve would cast a dark curse on my life. However, this didn’t stop her from naming me after America’s nicest witch.

                Superstitious, my mother instilled in me a sense there is something magical about the universe and as a child I avoided cracks in the sidewalk like the plague. When bad things happened, I was told everything happens for a reason; every failure is one step closer to success. 

                I also learned that nothing comes easy in life as I watched my mother work long hours at low-paying jobs to scrape the rent together. We ate a lot of spaghetti and english muffin pizzas and I vowed I would never struggle the way she did. Education would be my key to success. My life would be different.

                Different, it was. After high school, I fled the country and headed north to Halifax, Nova Scotia where I attended Dalhousie University as a nursing student. At eighteen, I was unsure of myself and quickly realized that I had made a mistake. While Halifax was beautiful, clean, and exciting, nursing wasn’t for me and after a year, I came home.

                The next few years were a blur of low-paying jobs at clothing stores and pizza shops. Like my mother, I worked fifty hours a week and had nothing to show for it. With no clue how I got in such an undesirable situation and desperate to get out, I re-enrolled in school in 2009, five years after I graduated from high school. I had developed a passion for psychology and threw myself into my new major at Husson University.

                Still, I felt unsettled, like I was on the wrong path. After only a year, the prospect of travel and adventure enticed me to leave Husson and I was off to Colorado. Finally, I had gotten something right. In the snowcapped mountains and open sky I found what I was looking for.

As cliché as it sounds, sometimes you just have to get away to figure out what you want. I came back to Maine with a focus I never had and a goal I had abandoned a long time ago for fear it was too unconventional.  I had gone back to me: a little off the wall, a lot gutsy, and alarmingly unrealistic.

                People don’t understand when I tell them I’m going to be a fashion journalist. They stare, confused as if I just made up a profession to suit me. It's like I just told them I’m moving to LA to be a famous movie star. “How are you going to make money?” they ask, not understanding that my decision to pursue a journalism career is the result of failed attempt after failed attempt to force passion for anything that would provide a stable, conisistent income. To me, it is apparent I'm never going to finish anything if I'm not doing what I love. The prospect of money and security isn't enticing enough to opt for practicality.

                I will graduate from Eastern Maine Community College in May with a degree in Liberal Studies and then I am off to California to get my Journalism and Media Studies degree at either Cal State Fullerton of USC. I am beyond excited, nervous, and certain I am going exactly where I am meant to be.