WHEN I was in college my mother wrote me once a week; she composed the letters as she sat under the dryer at the hair-dresser. I was a bit aimless then, not really sure what I wanted to study or who I wanted to be. My mother kept me somewhat tethered by filling me in on everything at home. One day, midway through my freshman year, a letter from home arrived in my mailbox as usual, but instead of my mother’s round script, it was addressed in my father’s illegible scrawl. I was taken aback: I think it was the only letter I ever received from him. I lost it long ago, but this is the gist of what it said: Find your passion. Follow that thing that speaks to you, that thing that makes you feel alive.
By my senior year I thought I had found that thing: I discovered writing. I decided I would move to New York City, get a job in publishing, and write the next great American novel. But it was 1981 and the country was in a deep recession. I couldn’t find a job in publishing, and I ended up instead getting an MBA and working in finance and marketing. I started a family. I left the corporate world for administrative roles in academia. But asideabout any of these other jobs. They were just that—jobs—and certainly not anything I was passionate about.
