I’m hardly unique in this, but I, like many of you reading this, have a tendency to downplay my accomplishments.

Remember how excited I was when I was first published in Time? That lasted all of ten minutes. So many people wrote in to congratulate me and so many people went out to buy a copy of that issue that I felt completely and utterly like a fraud. After all, I had only written a small travel piece. It wasn’t as if I’d broken news or done an investigative report. All I’d done was interview three people about how they’d spend a night out and somehow had that published in Time.

What should have been a time to pat myself on the back for breaking into one of the toughest markets in the world, was somehow one of the times I was the hardest on myself.

I wrote to my friend Jon soon after, and this is what I said:

“I wonder, is it ever enough? I thought getting published in Time would make me… I dunno… happier? More secure? Richer? None of the three has happened. My work changes me for sure, sometimes in ways I never imagined and I love doing it. The publication, not so much. You know how there are some people who feel like hotshots even when they’re working with the lowest pubs at $10 per piece? And then, there are those like me. I thought I’d get some confidence boost from it, but I still feel like that kid who started five years ago. I’m not ungrateful– far from it– and I’m not egotistic (thank God!), but it’s not life-changing, ya know? It’s as if you build up to this, you think, once this certain something happens, I’ll have ‘arrived’ or something. But while I’m really happy, it hasn’t changed a thing. Which is great, because I don’t want to think I’m a hotshot. But that buildup and that anxiety was such a wasted effort.”

I didn’t pitch Time again for a long time. Every time I thought of doing so, a voice inside me felt the need to chastise me for doing non-serious, fluffy journalism for such a well-respected international magazine. But lately, another voice started speaking up. How many people do you know who’ve written anything for Time, it said. The answer, before I came to Berkeley, was zero.

If nothing else, that’s something to be proud of.

Jon (and you’ll see why I love him), responded to my e-mail. He said,

“If it matters, I’m constantly impressed by you. Internationally published. Internationally traveled. Incredibly independent and confident. My instinctive way of saying it is that you’re incredibly independent and confident for a petite young Indian woman, but ridiculously understated. You are incredibly independent and confident for any person of any gender from anywhere. So… I think you ‘arrived’ a long time ago.”

I wrote to my editor at Time last week and offered up an idea similar to the one I’d been previously assigned.

I have my second assignment from Time, and this time, I’m damn proud.