Over the weekend I ran into someone I knew from college.  Someone who went on to become a physician and married a lawyer and wore really nice clothes with a cool, slick satin tie.  As we exchanged expected pleasantries, and that pause came, signaling questions were coming I braced myself:

So, Lisa, what do you do?

In a world that is bombarded by measurements of worth by production, degrees, and credentials, I knew his reaction before I even said the words: I’m a writer.

Eyelids disappear, brows temporarily move in with his receding hairline before slowly coming down with the forced, “ooookay!” Like I had just said I was at a drug pusher. Like how a physician would communicate, “Right on! Good for you, kind of.”

And as we talked about his house and private practice, his wonderful kids, and wonderfully stable life as a physician I wondered if he would ask what I love most about MY life and it’d be something like, “I love my partner and our son.  I’m chasing my dreams and the wild part is that they are on this crazy ride WITH me.  We’re happy and still searching for who we want to be.”

But I didn’t want to risk his eye sockets cracking under the disbelief so I just smiled and nodded as he spoke.  He wasn’t being disingenuous.  He was kind but it was clear that a life of creativity is equivalent to a life of chaos and disruption. No plan, no stability, no firm anything.

*Shrug.*  I know.  I kind of like it that way.

And yet, as I explained to Nick, it’s still hard for me to accept the creative road.  When so much of my life I WAS cultivating myself for a life of a physician (I was going to deliver babies all over the world in underdeveloped regions and no access to healthcare) or a lawyer (human rights, of course).  But instead, for today, I chose to be a writer.  I chose this pathless life of daily grassroots existence and wiping mud off my face from rejection and critical feedback.  What I most struggle with, though, is my ego.  Like most writers do. Like any writer does.  I struggle with the need to know that what I have inside me is worth sharing.

It’s ironic to be a writer.  It’s what you want to do more than anything and yet the uprooting of that truth is so painful and so consuming, you’ll do anything to NOT do the work.  And after the years it took to come forward and present myself to the world, I find that I need affirmation.  The desire to write is NOT enough.  It’s ego.  The desire to have your work distributed, known, respected, studied, analyzed, read, considered.

The professional life still beckons me.  To this day, I can’t read about human rights law programs without feeling a dagger in the heart.  When I was pregnant, I asked my OB/GYN if any older women attended medical school.  She nodded excitedly, “It’s hard, but it’s possible!”  It occurs to me on a daily basis that when one chooses to write, it’s one decision that cancels out every other viable life that would carry a great potential for a life on a sure trajectory.  It would be the exam you knew you could pass.  The purchase you wouldn’t need a receipt for because you know you’d never need to return it.

Writing is not any of those things.

Writing, unfortunately, manifests itself in a process that most of us, by nature, typically avoid.  The emotional ground work to create something true and resonating with our fellow humans means we have to live a bi-existence.  On one hand, you have to live in the world: buy groceries, endure DMV waiting lines, trip on sidewalk cracks, and fidget with broken belts just like everyone else.  And yet we have to maintain enough distance and quiet to be able to create an alternate universe to the world in hopes to write a book, poem, essay, or article that will help others realize an inner truth they didn’t know about themselves.

There are days I wish I had gone to med school or taken the LSAT to see if Could/Should have gone to law school.  But I know if I did switch places and magically be in that life, I know deep inside there’d be – not a roar (because that’d actually be delightfully promising) – but the whimpering sound of a dying darling girl who dreamed in words and couldn’t wait to rewrite the ending of stories she didn’t like.

I chose writing because it was my only true love.  I chose writing because it was my only real choice.  And for some reason that made the decision both easy and painfully difficult.