Failure Has Never Felt Like This

He spoke slowly, selecting his words from the shelf space created by our silence. His collar rested slightly askew, as if he had left his home in a rush and had since forgotten he was wearing one at all. The desk in front of me exhaled deeply, scribbling notes as he carefully strolled through each open-ended lecture point. My pen rested stagnant, hovering over my notebook. It was as mesmerized as I had become, listening to Thoreau's lines read aloud: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I could feel that anciently familiar stirring deep within my chest, opening me to this author who just minutes before I had considered "too transcendentalist for my taste." The professor continued to trill that Thoreau had been a brilliant naturalist, and could have become a scientist but had declined. At this my pen seized, and fell.

I wanted to be a doctor. Truly. Yet, there were times that my mind would longingly drift from anatomy to literature. At particularly difficult junctions, my mind would pencil the words behind the back of the eyes, pressing against the inside of my face, simply to give it texture. I watched my pen roll from my desk onto the titled tile, fleeing my scratched notepad. I didn't follow it.

My moment of epiphany quickly turned on its side, weeping broken brakes headed for a guardrail. All I wanted to do was write. I just wanted to write so I could breathe, so I could think. If I could just fucking think for a minute, just get a second. I had been studying science. Science. I could do that for the rest of my life...

At that moment, just for an instant, I watched myself packing a duffel bag. I watched myself purchase a one-way ticket. I watched myself run.

The classroom suffocated me. The walls were lifting me at my wrists and ankles, wringing the fluids from me like a sweaty towel. I placed my face in my palms, pressing the full weight of my head against them. I wasn't going to be a doctor.

I wasn't going to be a doctor.

I finally reached for my wayward pen. "Just because I can do something, does not mean I should." Yes. I wasn't going to be doctor. But, I was going to trek the globe. I was going to hold dozens of tiny faces in my arms and teach them how to read. I was going to fall asleep on a train in India and come back from an Australian beach inevitably sunburnt. I wasn't going to be a doctor. I was going be happy.