When I was younger, I wanted to be from Ohio.  It seemed like a nice, non-descript place to call home.  Unlike the South, with its glut of cultural associations: fried food, illiteracy, funny accents, slavery.  I preferred to blend into whatever crowd I was camouflaging myself with at the moment rather than get noticed.  But that plan went awry from time to time:  I remember my horror upon winning the Alabama state spelling bee and learning I had to give a television interview, followed by thankful relief to find out that my bee (sponsored by The Montgomery Advertiser rather than the larger-circulating Birmingham Post-Herald) was not a conduit to the national bee.  Additional television exposure and unwanted attention avoided!

But something inside me must have been crying out to be noticed, because I moved to New York City.  The last place you would expect a shrinking violet to call home.  The city that never sleeps and is lit up like a Christmas tree year-round.  I always thought it was humility that kept me under the radar; now I know I was just afraid of being seen.  Because being in New York has forced me to be seen, forced my flaws to the surface by turning me upside down, shaking me around, and letting the truth rise to the top.  The truth has a way of doing that, it turns out.  It also turns out that finding out who you really are, and being seen as that person, is not the worst thing that can happen.  Like the movie sets I pass so often, we are all in production.

The changing of the seasons means changing light.  I stepped onto the street a few mornings ago and looked up to see the top of a building I pass every day illuminated by the orange morning sun.  What had been an unremarkable facade, hidden among a crowd of them, was brilliant gold in its new share of light.