You could feel it, the potential you had. You'd finally found what your gift was. It wasn't academia, it was driving a bus. You heard about the job in the laundromat. Women were breaking into the field. Finally.

You took the risk. You knew your strength. Road trips with the family proved it. Long distance, inner city, and everything between, you found it all stimulating. No office walls, no one looking over your shoulder. Independence and trust bolstering your self-esteem. Knowing you can do this job. And you did it.

The potential you showed in interviews, at the tender age of nineteen put you in a rare position. Number twenty five. You survived the hazing, the male disgust. The bullying, the sexual innuendo, the straying hands, and forty-one-years later a stellar career ends as you quietly slip away to reinvent yourself.

Twenty five, you think once more. The twenty-fifth woman hired. Silver anniversary, and in a twisted way, the silver lining of your life. Now you find your true potential shining through where it glimmered before. The novel you wrote twenty-five years ago, the poems when you were a teen, the short stories in the one horrid year of university, burst through. Redefine.

You sit behind the laptop and begin. You write. The stories come, and potential is no longer a curse.