What to do when you’re hiding what you love

Embarrassed about your Dream Project?

Just after college I’d write personal essays and lock them away on my hard drive never to see the light of day because I’d just started my first big girl job and I was dead set on becoming a Serious Public Health Person. I was an executive assistant to a CEO and I took the job because I wanted a birds eye view of what it took to run an organization. Because that’s what I wanted to do one day.

So my secret little writing habit felt super problematic. There was no way I could share personal essays about running on the internet if I wanted to be taken seriously and ascend within my chosen career path. There was simply no place for my writing.

I was working within the field of global surgery, a field dominated by men with lots of letters behind their name, including M.D. By that point, I’d decided to forego medical school. I knew I would be a little bit less qualified because I was not a doctor – and that was to say nothing of my age or gender. None of the doctor executives had blogs. None of them were sharing flimsy little musings on the interwebs. And so I couldn’t either.

But I never quit writing about running. And I never quit reading about running and one day I found a book by George Sheehan – Dr. George Sheehan – called Running & Being. He was a cardiologist, a runner, and a writer. He became a NYT bestselling author.

There was no overlap between his professional pursuits and his private pursuits. He was a cardiologist. He wrote books about running. 

Later I’d learn about the bestselling author and physician, Abraham Verghese. “One of the best books I’ve read in my entire life.” That’s what Oprah said about one of his books.

Eventually, I understood it was possible to be more than one thing. Because we are all more than one thing. Our professional life is only one of the many lives we live and identities we hold.  My three identities (Serious Business Person, Writer, Runner) didn’t have to go together, rhyme, or be integrated. They could simply be. 

Many of us don’t begin doing work we want to do because we need it to fit or make sense to the outside world. Some of us stop doing work we love and care about, quit pursuing projects we care about because we’re afraid of how it looks or fear it’s not acceptable to want and do what we want to want and do. We can’t figure out how our Dream Projects fit in an acceptable way to others – let alone ourselves.

We so badly want to make sense to ourselves and when I was 22 years old and wanting to be a public health expert and also wanting to write personal essays about my feelings and observations and hobbies, I couldn’t make it make sense. I wanted a clean narrative of who I was, but the reality is that I am just like you: Human. We are messy and multifaceted and messy and nonsensical and spectacular. None of us is one thing. 

The heart wants what it wants.

I say let it have it.

As David Whyte says, “What you can plan is too small for you to live.”

What you can make fit, what you can make sense of, perhaps it’s not big enough. Not big enough to contain you.

Give yourself the gift of being unexplainable. Trade stocks by day, write your poetry by night. Be an accountant and a one man band, or an analyst that blends teas, or a broker and a beekeeper. 

Go ahead. Show us that it all belongs.