When I was four or five I asked my mom if any of the letters in the mail were for me. Yes, she said, and opened an envelope and read: Dear Steffie, we would like to offer you a job as an airline stewardess (that's what they were called back then) when you grow up. Please contact us when you are eighteen years old.

I couldn't yet read and so I believed that the piece of mail my mom "read" was really an offer of employment for me specifically. For several years I thought that was what I would be when I grew up. I have no idea why my mom picked that profession, I'd never said I wanted to be one, but I didn't question my destiny. My career was set.

I forgot about it as I grew older and when I was in elementary school my favorite thing to play was secretary (that's what they were called back then). I loved pretending to sit at a desk and perform tasks like carefully writing lists, making check marks, answering the phone and shuffling papers into neat stacks. Maybe it was the organization that soothed me – to this day I crave order in my home.

Yes, I had lofty aspirations.

The next thing I remember wanting to be was a writer. I did very well on essays in high school, wrote some dog awful poetry and started a story that now, twenty-three years later, is close to being made into a book.

I only wrote a few pages of the story when I was a sophomore. It was about a high school romance. Okay, yes, it was based on my real life experiences, which I thought were tragic and dramatic enough to become literature. I've kept some of the names, the football game, the dance, the mean girl, the disbelief that a hot guy (Troy from my book is waaay hotter than the dude I crushed on back then, though) liked me, which constituted pretty much all that I had written back when I was fifteen.

Many of my high school memories are crystallized in my mind. Maybe it's because I kept a journal that I've reread over the years. Maybe this is why I feel so connected to writing for young adults.

While the "coffee, tea, or me" gig never panned out, I did get into admin work (that's what they call it now) when I grew up. I still get a little thrill starting my morning with piles of "to dos" that I clear off by the end of the day.

And now I can also say I became a writer. Not because I have a book published, yet, but because I am determined to take the seeds of a story from my adolescent self and turn them into the fulfillment of a dream.