Joan Didion opens her essay "Goodbye To All That" with the declaration that it is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. But with my career, it was in fact just the opposite:

These photos, the polaroids that got me on a plane to Paris, were only one beginning of many. There was also the beginning of department store and catalog work, circa age 8; the beginning when I graduated, in my teens, to appearing in campaigns and commercials for Asian brands who wanted to shoot in my country. Then I went to college, and met two agents while I was working on a story for the student newspaper, and the pictures they took were another beginning. But these snapshots will do for the story I am telling you now, because once they had been taken, a certain chain of events was set in motion that, to this day, seems ineluctable. Almost as soon as I had hit "Send" on the e-mail, I had a reply asking if my passport was up to date. The following morning, I left.

For the record, when the end came, it was pretty damn clear.