No, for the last time I am not a pre-pubescent boy writing this from his parents’ basement while simultaneously Twittering, beating an Indonesian teenager at WarCraft and devouring frozen fishsticks.

My name is Melissa Lafsky, I’m a 29-year-old non-practicing attorney living in Brooklyn (where else?). I grew up in the D.C. area, got a B.A. from Dartmouth College and proceeded to weasel my way into the University of Virginia Law School. After graduating with a class rank somewhere appropriately average, I leaped between several law firms in New York City, and then started a blog about my experiences as a paralegal, summer associate and junior attorney. Within a month, my blog was discovered by Gawker (chances are, if you’re reading this, you’ve heard of it). Readers flooded the site by the thousands, and by December of 2005 the blog had been serenaded in a bevy of important-sounding places like the New York Times, the New York Post, the Harvard Law Record, the ABA Journal, Newsday and lots of lofty legal blogs. Daily traffic topped twenty thousand visitors per day (which back then was a lot, I swear), people were commenting on posts by the hundreds, and I started getting fan mail, requests for legal advice, solicitations for affairs and anonymous threats to reveal my identity and get me fired. I also began meeting other bloggers and journalists, developing a novel based on the blog and exploring writing opportunities outside confines of my Midtown office. Sleep was a pipe dream.

At the end of the calendar year, ten months and over a million visitors since the blog’s inception, I resigned from my job in order to avoid getting canned and embarrassing my coworkers (and myself — but that was pretty much inevitable). After a stint as an associate editor at the Huffington Post, I spent a year as the editor of the New York Times‘ Freakonomics blog. By day I am now the deputy web editor at Discover magazine, and I spend my nights plugging away on a couple book projects, frequenting any bakeries offering free samples, and reveling in the shed burden of anonymity — all those doubts of my actually being a girl were getting on my nerves.

Photography by Kwaku Alston