Portrait : Quiet strenght

« I’m not an adventuress, I like my comfort » she says with a smile. Yet, twenty-three year old Pauline Ranger has already had to face a major ordeal. When she was twenty, her mother had a relapse of breast cancer. At this pivotal age when she was making decisions regarding what she wanted to do and who she wanted to become, this trial could have crushed her, all the more as her family of four had been her whole world up until then. But it would not take into account Pauline’s main quality : optimism. “What doesn’t kill you only make you stronger” could be her motto. The only thing she wants to remember about this hardship, is that it came as a sort of double revelation. As it brought the family and close friends even more together, she understood that this little unit was for ever the roots from where she would take her strength. As she realised how fragile life could be, she decided that it was time for her to break momentarily away from that comfort to find, as she says, “her true self”. In twenty years, the shy Pauline had travelled through the books she loved, but never left Nancy, where she was born. She decided that she had to endanger herself to make things happen. Her first challenge was therefore to go on her own to Wales for one year. There, among Welsh, Germans and Italians, she develops a liking for meeting new people, discovering other cultures, opening up. When she comes back, she is changed. She knows she is not going to choose what she considers the easy way, becoming an English teacher. With a renewed optimism and greater confidence, she decides to realise her dream and try to make her way in journalism, or more specifically in TV, with which she fell in love during an internship. Despite this new taste for risk, she still considers that if she is now more of an adventuress, she is “an adventuress in an armchair”. She trusts journalism will bring her the intellectual challenge she is looking for. Her feet deeply anchored in the ground, her mind scrutinizing the world, Pauline Ranger has now found her own balance.