Just after I signed the contract to write Making a Life, Janine Vangool, publisher of Uppercase, invited me to track my journey in the Beginnings column of her magazine. Over the next 2½ years, I wrote essays for ten issues (Numbers 30 through 40). In these essays I explored everything from why I decided to leave a secure, full-time job without knowing what I wanted the next steps in my career to be to how a trip to Oaxaca inspired me to rethink my own cultural roots to the inevitable bouts of insecurity I faced while writing.