I'm nineteen-years-old and about to turn twenty. I have set a timeline to my life that somehow, some way I have managed to follow roughly, if not at times precisely. It started when I was 3 and decided I would be a star. On my All About Me poster, which also included "my favorite part of me" being my bellybutton, I let the world know for the first time that I would be a star by age 30. However, I would not be a dancer, actor, singer, etc...I would be a star. Three-year-olds are stubborn that way.

By 8, I decided I would have to be Miss. America one day, because my great-grandmother, Dorthy (whom I was named after in Hebrew, Davora), told me I would either have to be a champion ice-skater or Miss. America. Ice was cold.

By highschool I would be living in New York, studying acting, singing, and dancing; by my 20's I would be starring as Velma Kelly in Chicago.

Needless to say, my goals were on the slightly more ambitious side, yet not at all unattainable to an eight-year-old girl with larger-than-face bifocals, who dreamed of long legs and fame. I felt and knew it was my duty to mankind to give myself over to the soul of performing. It was that moment when I had the solo in my dance concert, dressed as a miniature Purple People Eater with lime-green glitter and a purple satin leotard, tapping my patent leather tap shoes in a perfect "step, shuffle, ball change, step, shuffle, ball change" that I knew I had inherited the destiny of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Bette Midler (yes)!

Fast forward to a nineteen-year-old girl living in New York, one avenue from Steps Dance Center. I don't remember many playdates between 5th grade and highschool, and very seldom can I recall soccer practice, note-passing, or experimenting with adolescence...
but I do remember daydreaming like I had never dreamnt before and praying for change, like my soul was being choked just by being in day school each day. And by nine-years-old I got a little scam-like brochure in the mail for a pageant.

By 10, I was crowned Miss. Junior America Pre-Teen East Coast. (Without diving too far into this story, it involves Bernadette Peters, monkeys, alien-nerf balls, and way too much spunk and quirk to have worked in any other moment...but saving this one for another time...)

By middle school I was freed one day a week for a New York marathon, hopping trains at 5 am to make the 12:30 audition slot (15 minutes of waiting for a quick 3o seconds of...smiling?....knowing that in 30 seconds my mother and I would run out of that building into the amusement park of New York, able to see any Broadway show and eat at any fancy restaurant before getting back on a 6ish train to Baltimore, and every once in a while booking a commercial that would be a whole other holiday to enjoy).

By highschool I was taking classes in New York.

By 18 I was here.

So when I get lost, I go back to my timeline. I hit everything. I've created timelines since, and have hit every punch on them, too. And then my ideas get bigger, my goals higher, my bar raising, my expectations shooting through the roof. And then I call my mother. She tells me repeatedly to look back on the coke-bottle glasses-wearing eight-year-old misfit who had no friends but knew exactly which way she was heading. And when I do, I see that that little weirdo was the happiest girl in the world, because doubt had no place in her life and hope was a weakness that had no hold on her. She just knew and trusted, and followed that assurance that held itself so strong in her heart. And when those thoughts of doubt come into my head, and my focus gets cloudy and milky-gray, I find that silver lining that is there in every cloud, the ideal that I painted in gold on my All About Me poster; and I get started on my next timeline.