dreams, knowing, and the pussycat dolls

What do I want to be when I grow up? Well, the Pussycat Dolls, oft-misquoted, say they want to "have groupies," but I appreciate being able to go to the grocery store with no makeup on.

My earliest answer on record is tucked away in some box under the bed. When I was four, my best friend and I said in our school "getting-to-know-you" guide that we wanted to be princesses. My step-cousin pointed out, as I climbed out of the pool during my prolonged awkward phase, dried my frizzy hair, and put my dorky glasses back on, that I looked like Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries "before the makeover." Ouch.

Since then, I've been asked the question many times and had a ton of different responses and a lot of aimless shrugs.

There were the days when I wanted to be a ballerina. It seemed awfully glamorous. One of my ballet teachers, who must have been about eighteen at the time, drove a bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle with press-on smiley face stickers (it was the 90s), and I thought she was the coolest person alive. Fear of bright lights notwithstanding, the thought of being so graceful I got paid for it was appealing. Also, I was in love with stage makeup because it was like grown-up-sanctioned dress up.

Then there were the days of wanting to be a writer. I would come up with story ideas and begin them furtively before losing interest. They would begin with my mind wandering, asking "what if" and then exploring where territory went. They were long, and I mean long, on detail, and I remember being shocked when my English teacher explained what it meant to be concise. How could writing less be a good thing? I thought I might write poetry, then, and I thought rhyming dictionaries were cheating because it seemed that half the fun was coming up with absurd rhymes.

Then there were the days of wanting to be a marine biologist. What this really meant was that I wanted to play with the dolphins at Sea World. I wanted Shamu to be my best friend, and I was not the least bit interested in hearing that there were hundreds of Shamus. To me, there was but one, and I would train him someday.

Then I kind of spun off course. For many years, I stopped dreaming a bit and didn't know what I wanted. Writing still sounded appealing, but having dreams that impractical seemed foolish and childish. Teaching was out of the question because I had a horrible fear of being wrong and had a recurrent sense that I might teach the class some long-winded explanation and then have to un-teach them the next day because I had been all wrong. I started running, and suddenly, the idea of being a ballerina seemed far-fetched and ridiculous, as I could barely touch my toes anymore. I realized that marine biologists had to be interested in things like plankton, and that sounded awful. I thought about being a doctor, but what pressure-- suppose someone died on my watch.

This not-knowing lasted for quite some time. I wanted THE answer and didn't have it.

So as I prepared to go off to college, I told people I wanted to major in international relations or biomedical engineering, without really having an understanding of what either was about. I applied to schools within the universities I applied to based on what I thought were the strengths of that school. Since I got a scholarship to Vanderbilt and I had applied to their engineering school, I began college majoring in biomedical engineering.

I hated it, but whenever someone brought up the possibility of switching majors, even during freshman year, I would insist that I had already invested too much time in it and didn't want to become behind. BEHIND. I don't know whom it was that was always one step ahead of me, but that invisible force drew me forwards and kept me heading down a course I hated.

My sophomore year was tumultuous to say the least, but I eventually gave up engineering. I chose a new major--medicine, health, and society. I LOVED it. I thought I'd work in health policy, and I was on fire. My parents suggested that the best way to do this might be to go to law school, and so that's what I set out to do. I was in love with having a plan. I had a detailed map of what to do with my life and how to do it, and it set my mind to rest. I thought the journey was over.

And yet, I would grow unsettled. I wondered how much law school really had to do with health policy after all. My boyfriend at the time, himself a third year law student, assured me the two disciplines were very unrelated. At the same time, I was volunteering at a hospice for one class and visiting health care clinics for vulnerable populations that were run by local nurse practitioners in another. Slowly, the idea came to me that I should be a nurse practitioner.

This idea unsettled me. I didn't want to change paths yet again. I thought stubbornly that I had already made up my mind and wondered why these doubts came up now. It seemed "too late" to change course. I fancied myself a middle-aged career woman, not a college student. I resisted the desire to be a nurse with every fiber of my being. And then one day, I stopped resisting. In the final week of my junior year of college, I suddenly knew that I wanted to be a nurse practitioner. And this was not like the old knowing but an entirely new kind of assurance that I had complete faith in.

I still took the LSATs a month later, still kept law school open as a possibility just in case I changed my mind, but I knew I wouldn't. From day one, I began scripting a plan for the classes I would need to take to prepare to enter an accelerated nursing program when I finished senior year. I've made many revisions along the way, but I am finally almost there.

Yesterday, I picked up my student ID and bought some scrubs and my medical supplies. I insisted that my parents sit down so I could use my new "anaerobic sphygmomanometer" to take their blood pressure, and as I listened to the blood coursing through their brachial arteries, I knew that this is it.

And so I'm excited. And I've realized that attaching my wagon to one dream does not mean I abandon the rest. I still write from time to time. I swam with the dolphins at Sea World on a family vacation. I danced, awkward and un-self-aware, at my fair share of homecomings and proms. I watch crime dramas on TV and argue about health reform. I'll never be a princess, but I got a tiara from a sketchy costume shop in the bad part of town for my birthday party one year.

Yes, the best way to know life is to live it.

gratitude

They say to write what you know.

I know:

Life is a gift. It is a beautiful, maddening, amazing, and sometimes exquisitely painful gift. 

I have sometimes wanted to stand in the return line at Macy's with a gift receipt and exchange it for something shinier, but I know better. I am grateful. 

I was always taught to write thank-you notes for gifts, and I still spend the last week of December writing thank-you notes to relatives. Over the years, my gratitude has changed. 

It started as pictures scrawled in crayon, which my uncle called "refrigerator art." For years it was a formulaic "Dear ____, Thank you for the _____. It is so pretty. Love, Katie." These days, it's a more heartfelt note, with an update on the family and some well wishes thrown in. Either way, I think if there's one lesson I've learned over and over by messing it up, it's that gratitude, more than kindness or love or tolerance or anything else, is what makes the world go 'round. They are important, for sure, but gratitude acknowledges that we are constantly and abundantly blessed.

Gratitude to God says, "I am small. I am undeserving of Your great love and mercy and grace, and I know that were I to spend the rest of my life trying to prove my worth, I could not. And yet I will accept this great gift and treasure it and build the fiber of my heart around it, so that it is such a part of me that it cannot be torn out. I cannot repay the gift in kind, so I will sow it with deep roots and try to build a life around it."

Gratitude to another person says, "You have offered me something valuable, not just in what is tangible but in the intention behind it. I value you, and I value our relationship. It is give-and-take, not based on strict and calculating equality but based on balance. We put in what we can sacrifice and take what we need."

And so I am thankful for my family and my friends and God and my life. I am thankful for forgiveness and love and acceptance. I am thankful for little pleasures, bad crime dramas on television and long, lazy nights with a friend. I am thankful for things that hurt because there is a blessing in everything. What appears to be meaningless suffering is simply suffering that we cannot yet understand. 

I once had to keep a gratitude journal and then reflect on the experience for a seminar I took on emotion my junior year of college. It spanned a week, and it was a hard week. I spent several days of it in the hospital, and yet I chronicled the little things, a phone call from home and juicy strawberries from the cafeteria. It wasn't a life-changing experience, and it didn't catapult me into a new reality. Change doesn't often happen like that. But it did force me to notice my blessings, to open my eyes instead of clenching them shut and wringing my hands in distress.

I used to believe that optimism was just self-delusion, that people who looked on the bright side weren't "in-the-know." That if they just really knew what it felt like to suffer, then they would be pessimists, too. And counting my blessings is still an act of self-will. I have to listen to the Negative Nancy that lives inside my brain and then forcefully turn away, refuse to engage in such wallowing, direct my energy towards what is worth my time.

So I am grateful.