6. Writing for my life
The most important thing
I had other plans for this newsletter, but my dad just sent me the email I most needed to receive. He began by referencing a conversation in Wagner’s Siegfried, the third opera in the Ring cycle, where two characters, Mime and Wotan play a guessing game where the loser must forfeit his life. Rather than ask for the information he needs, Mime asks factual questions he already knows the answer to. A missed opportunity when he desperately needs to know how to reforge a broken sword.
My dad then wrote:
While I will never ever understand Wagner as a librettist, I do like the point of how we often fail to ask or say the most important thing. The most important thing I wanted to say to you was that I think you are on the right track the way you are trying to figure out your professional life. So many of the details, prestigious grad school or no, internship with influential people, etc. don't really matter that much when all's said and done. What matters is that you develop your talents, day by day, cultivating your creative abilities through hard work, habit, and imagination. This plan will certainly pay off, maybe not according to "plan", but in the most essential way of taking you to a place where you feel good about what you do. I feel like I know this. It can seem like there is a lot to worry about when you are young, since decisions taken, and not taken, have lasting consequences. No way to foresee all of that. But you should know that your basic way of dealing with your professional life is a good one, right in the important ways, and one that almost always works in my experience.
So with that in mind, here is an essay I wrote back in December for an essay contest I didn’t win. When submitting writing anywhere, I mostly strike out. But seven months later, after reading my dad’s email, I returned to the essay because it reveals that for so long, maybe for my whole life, I have known the way forward.
Maybe we all do.
Writing for my life
When I was 9 years old, my fourth-grade teacher predicted a career for every student in our class. She forecast that I would be a writer, and I was thrilled. (Christina, bestowed a future in real estate, was not.) I have written throughout my life and always imagined my eventual career would involve the crafting of words and telling of stories.
The intervening years since that day in elementary school have been meandering at best, as I deviated from the many paths I imagined for myself. I spent a summer studying French. A summer pipetting in a cardiovascular wet lab. A summer conducting interviews and researching the opioid epidemic. A sweaty, grass-stained summer interning at a botanical garden. I graduated college with a hodgepodge of disjointed experiences, an unfinished set of pre-medical requisites, and an anthropology degree. While my friends locked down jobs in investment banking and moved to New York City, I laughed at my unemployability as I struggled to find a job, finally landing in a health policy research assistantship in Boston.
The research itself was engaging, but I never felt fulfilled. I slogged through Excel sheets and PowerPoint slides, surrounded by brilliant people, but demoralized that I rarely got to participate in the research process. The creative rush I experienced while writing was absent from my role as a research assistant, and I felt stuck and stifled.
This grant-funded contract position ended in the summer of 2020, leaving me jobless in the middle of the pandemic. For months, I searched persistently for my next role—health-related work, I hoped, research translation to policy and lay audiences, I parroted in Zoom interviews—but I was up against older and more experienced candidates in a brutal job market. I heard only deafening, defeating silence (and the occasional, welcome rejection).
When I could not land my next “career path” job and I was running out of money, I started work as an administrative assistant at a chiropractic office. It was not my dream job, but it allowed me to focus on my competitive running, training hard for races, whenever they became possible. And through it all, I kept writing. I wrote and wrote. I composed lines in the shower and while scanning patient files and on my runs along the Charles River. I wrote blog posts. Personal essays. Food how-tos. Coronavirus features. I pitched aspirationally, sending many shouts into the void. Occasionally, I got lucky. When my writing landed somewhere, I grew motivated, and I felt less bruised when my Many Other Essays landed nowhere.
I didn’t know what I was doing, but I sought out people who did. I’d had minimal career mentorship at that point, but I finagled a few phone calls with health policy journalists I admired. I was astonished by how generous they were with their time, even while breaking news on deadline. One reporter I spoke with recounted how, when he was just entering the industry, Atul Gawande talked with him for an hour, so the least he could do was pass some wisdom on to me. Then he followed with, “Don’t be a reporter unless you absolutely have to. But keep writing no matter what.”
So far, I’ve taken his advice, steering away from journalism. But I keep writing no matter what.
I reached out to writers who freelance full time, and we discussed health insurance in the gig economy, the arduous process of accruing clients, and the waiting game of securing chance opportunities. I joined an online community that opened the door to resources I didn’t know existed: examples of successful pitches, databases of editors’ email addresses, weekly writing opportunities, advocacy groups pushing for freelance unions, and heaps of advice I am just beginning to sift through. I‘ve found solidarity with the writers out there trying to make it, and am invigorated by their successes, which I hope can become my own.
Still, writing is an unstructured, uncharted path, and freelancing even more so. I do not always feel like I have made the right decisions as my friends get promoted in their consulting jobs or finish their first semesters of med school and I stare into my crumb-dusted laptop screen. On a day when I was feeling particularly downtrodden, I lamented to my boyfriend, “I don’t know what I want to do!” He looked me in the eye, unwilling to indulge my existential floundering, and grounded me, “You know what you want to do.”
I did. And I do.
A few other things I’ve been writing
Sha’Carri Richardson To Serve Competition Ban For Weed: Why WADA’s Cannabis Rules Need Rethinking (explainer on WADA’s outdated cannabis ban and why their rules aren’t evidence-based)
Tastes Like Capitalism (critical look at how we came to know the flavors of both artificial and “natural” watermelon)