Senior year at Smith College, Devin’s boyfriend — studying abroad in England — cheated on her right before he was due to fly home for her senior formal.
Most people would have spent that week falling apart. Instead, she walked into the college’s career development office and found a lead: a television producer, a fellow alum, married to another Smith graduate. She sat down with a pencil and a piece of paper and wrote him a letter — telling him, only half-joking, that he’d be left behind once she had her big Hollywood career.
He called her in her dorm room. Offered her a job as a writer’s assistant if his pilot got picked up.
The pilot never aired. But the lesson stuck: pain doesn’t have to end a chapter. Sometimes it’s the pen.