On loose ends.

When I was a kid, someone bought me a journal—one of those preteen handbooks for getting to know yourself that was probably made by American Girl or Lisa Frank or Seventeen or something. I remember eagerly flipping through it, savoring page after page of thoughtful questions, clean answer lines, and fresh, white space in which to write and doodle and draw.

I was ecstatic. As soon as I had a moment to myself, I grabbed my favorite pen and dutifully began to fill in the blanks. But somewhere along the line, I made a mistake. I didn't like the look of one of my drawings, or I crossed out a word or two. Suddenly, in my eyes, the story I had written was no longer accurate. I pleaded my way into getting a new copy from the bookstore so I could author a new, untarnished life story.

This kind of fastidiousness in a 10-year old might be cute (okay, or profoundly irritating), but when it persists into adulthood largely unnoticed... it's stealthy, and seductive, and mean.

Four years ago, I tossed aside my dream of being a science writer in favor of the far more practical and stable career of nursing. Struck by an intuitive stirring, I threw myself headlong into understanding everything I could about birth and the perinatal experience. I was going to be a labor and delivery nurse.

Then I was a labor and delivery nurse.

And then, I wasn't.

It has been a year and a half, and I still haven't gotten over how swiftly that transition came about. How I started out so thrilled and ended up so miserable. How my patient care never once suffered, yet in the course of mere days I suddenly became both the instigator and the defendant. How a dream that I had harbored for the better part of two years evaporated in a single instant.

A very big part of me wishes I could have squeezed my very square self into that very round hole. An even bigger part of me thinks that I was rounder than I gave myself credit for—that if I had just been able to muscle my way through the days, it would have gotten easier and I would have changed and grown in ways that I didn't think possible in those first couple of months. That, in time, I would have developed the strength to fight the system to which I was so viscerally opposed.

But whether out of simple self-preservation or a paralyzing fear of failure, I walked away. And as much as the profession called after me, I just couldn't get myself to turn around.

Today I'm doing a job that would make that 24-year old in Boulder swell with pride. And I love my job. I'm great at my job. In quite a few respects, this seems to be the work I was born to do. But there are days and weeks when I am still overcome by shame and regret over what might have been.

And only now—after managing (or failing to manage) intractable back pain for the better part of a month, after seeing an acupuncturist who unearthed dense, knotty ropes of muscle not only in my upper and lower back, but also in my jaw, neck, shoulders, diaphragm, hips, glutes, hamstrings, and calves—do I consider that maybe, just maybe, it's time to let. it. all. go.

Because here's the thing: we can't live every life. I don't get to be a Nobel prize-winning astrophysicist and a paradigm-shifting midwife and an acclaimed science writer with admirable work/life balance. Say what you want about having it all, but there are some choices that are simply mutually exclusive. We pick and choose, we release and forego. For such an obvious fact, I am amazed at how novel and instructive it seems.

I have to acknowledge that there's a path I chose not to follow. That I can't do and be everything, that my life and the story of it may never come full circle. That some things may not make sense. That it will be messy, and there will be strikes and scribbles and unfinished business and hanging ellipses.

I have to find a way to trust that just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it's not okay.

It is okay. It's more than okay. I'm happy. And I think it's time to let that be enough.