The thing about getting older, I’ve found, is that each choice you make along the way feels as if it narrows your options. If you choose to go to law school then you can’t, say, be a doctor, or a veterinarian or an astronaut. But I don’t think the path narrows as much or as quickly as we sometimes think. This is the life advice I’m most proud of myself for figuring out early on. Life is long and we can be more than one thing.
When I was younger, I felt like I had to be very pragmatic about my career choices: I figured I’d be a lawyer. I pursued this track with singular focus from high school, straight on to college, and all the way through law school. Still, the whole time I was in school, a nagging feeling pulled at my insides. I longed to get creative.
I wanted to write, and I wanted to write not just for fun, but to be taken seriously. Not like Dostoyevsky seriously, mind you, but you know, as if my endeavors mattered. I had to decide I could do, could be, more than that one thing I had already chosen.
And then I needed to figure out how. In law school, I had to push out my elbows and create enough space for my writing to co-exist with my legal studies. I set timers throughout the day in fifteen-minute increments, and I used those spare minutes to write (or stare at a blank page if that’s all I could manage). I was diligent. I didn’t get a lot of time each day, but I noticed that with the little bit I had, the words added up. (Sound familiar to any working women out there?) Slowly but surely, I created a book.
It was hard work. Even embarrassing work. I didn’t have any external validation to help me justify the time spent toiling away at books that might never be read by anyone except me. People close to me said I should put the writing aside and focus entirely on school and then, when I finished school, on billing every hour I could to set myself up for becoming a partner. But what I wanted most was a life that felt right for me specifically, and I became increasingly convinced that such a life had to include writing.
In my legal career, I was carving out a niche negotiating contracts (and I became very good at it), a choice that allowed me a bit more autonomy than I would have had otherwise at that stage. As a second-year associate, I sold my first novel to Disney-Hyperion, and then four more after that. And in there I added a third dimension: motherhood. Another spinning plate to keep in the air, another set of challenges and joys. Usually that meant firing up the laptop as soon as I got my daughter to sleep, which always, always took longer than I hoped. Sometimes it meant typing on my phone while holding a crying baby in the middle of the night, knowing I had to be at work first thing in the morning. Almost always it meant watching the clock at every social engagement, worried about the minutes ticking by, minutes I should be in front of my computer.
With the help of luck, privilege, hard work, and—let’s be real—never enough exercise, I kept it up for eight years until “Whisper Network”, the book that changed my life and allowed me to stop practicing law full time. The characters in “Whisper Network” chase the dream of having it all, but unless someone else has the secret sauce, I’m pretty sure having it all simply doesn’t exist.
It’s possible to have a lot, though. And for that I think the secret sauce is daily forgiveness. I could beat myself up on the regular with how often I fall short of what I hoped to accomplish in each 24-hour span, but trust me, I’ve tried it, and all that mindset breeds is frustration and bad energy—not a great place from which to work. Better to wipe the slate clean and start fresh the next morning with kindness to yourself and hope for the day’s work ahead.
I crafted this path, brick by brick, contract by contract, word by word and most days I’m still trying to walk this path that I haven’t just chosen, but created. And you know what? Every day (okay, 90% of days) I wake up feeling like it’s totally worth it. As for that pesky 10%, that’s why I have a network of supporters in my life to remind me of my “why” and to help me remember it’s absolutely normal to stumble along the way.
