I have a profile when you google me -- something I didn't realize until yesterday when I was googling Meng's name because she had been in a car accident and she didn't pop up right away. My name, especially because of the spelling ('e-y' as I always tell people and then they go ahead and spell it 'Rosy' or 'Rosie' which always looks a little strange to me, like when you wake up and you can't move your arm because its gone to sleep and now it's someone else's arm), makes me easy to find. Also, I have quite a bit on the internet -- websites designed, blogs, e-mail, picasa and linkedin -- unlike the other Rosey Waters, who works for a theater company in Colorado, who managed to snap up the twitter account roseywaters, or the drag queen Rosey Waters, who I only saw one hit from on the first page.
Anyways, the point is, I have a google profile, and currently it doesn't say anything useful. There is a section in which you can 'tell people about yourself' and I was trying to be clever -- making a statement that I am about to graduate from college and therefore must question everything that I do. Unfortunately, this didn't work very well, but it got me back to something I've been thinking about a lot recently.
Have you ever read the Loorie Moore story How to Become a Writer? If you haven't, I suggest you do. I read it in high school with DePeter, and it turns out I forgot quite a bit of it -- indeed the line that I thought was in it, seems to have come from my imagination: 'Try to be a psychologist. Try to be anything but a writer'. Perhaps not in the story, but the idea comes through in the prose. In The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner discusses the fact that if you're a writer, you write -- it doesn't matter if you're told you are the worst author on the planet, if you never get published, or if you end up on the New York Times Best Seller List -- if you're a writer, you can't help but write. And these sentiments have been making me think.
When I was a sophomore in high school I saw Grey's Anatomy for the first time and took lifeguarding as my gym class -- so you say? Well, this was the year I decided I wanted to become a doctor. I started researching the profession -- because no one can say they want to be a doctor just because they like Grey's Anatomy and were fascinated by the way the human body works from their lifeguarding class -- and found the more I looked into it, the more interesting it seemed. Before this, I had never thought of myself as a science person -- 'I'm a humanities person' I would say with casual confidence as I sailed through History and English -- but after finding out what it would take to become a doctor, I actually did become interested in science. The labs were the best -- especially chemistry labs. I loved playing with chemicals and looking at cells through microscopes and learning.
Now, if you'll recall, I wrote a post about my history with writing. It was during this time that I was doing my whole RPG thing -- and you can't get paid to RP (unfortunately, I would have made a killing from those years if I could have been). It came up every now and then -- the desire to write professionally -- but as I was finding, you could write and still do other things (not have a life or study properly, but you could learn about biology and pretend to study... I was not as good a student in high school as my grades would suggest), so I decided that I would become a doctor and write on the side -- you know, in all that spare time I would have in med school and during my internship.
But I found out that you can't really give yourself completely to something, unless you give up something else you care about. The kind of grades you need for med school require a certain amount of sacrifice -- and as I said, I'm not the best student ever (in fact I didn't understand how to study until junior year of college) so I would have had to give up a lot. The semester I spent working on biology, chemistry, physics and calculus was the most strenuous semester I've had in college, and probably the second most unhappy time of my life (the first being the next semester for various reasons).
And this was the time when I was trying not to be a writer.
The end of the awful semester came and with it came the knowledge that I couldn't be a doctor. I would have to sacrifice so much more then my writing to do what I needed to do in order to become a doctor, and writing was the one thing I could not, and would not, sacrifice because it was the only thing that made me happy (at the time). Writing was among the host of reasons I decided against medical school, but it was, I will admit with a little cringe, the most important.
Armed with this knowledge, I was faced with a new problem -- did this mean I wanted to write professionally? Should I change my major and do literature instead of psychology?
Whenever I think about how I want to write professionally, its always as a side job -- the sort of thing I do because I have to, not because it will make me money. Because, lets be honest, if I wanted to write professionally and do nothing else, I wouldn't have come to college (it would have been a huge waste of money and time). So that kind of decided me. I would stay in school, get a degree, work when I left school and write on the side.
I had tried not to be a writer, and for better or worse, the world -- well myself -- wouldn't let me.
Of course, the world is never fair and as soon as I decided I didn't want to a be a doctor, and took other classes, I found that really... I did. Maybe not a doctor -- though the ache exists still, and when people say things like 'And then you'll got to med school' and I go 'What?' I always want to say 'Really? You think I would be a good doctor?' -- but something in medicine.
Now it turned out that I had been trying not to be a writer, but I was also trying not to be a biology person. And in both cases I failed. Turns out I want to be both. And no, I can't combine them and write about biology -- for one thing, who says I don't already? And for another -- I want to go to grad school and study immunology... or neurotransmitters... or viruses. I want to be Dr. Rosey Waters, PhD.
So back to the initial thought -- does trying not to be something -- like a writer, or a research scientist -- and failing, mean you should do it? The failure to not do something seems to indicate a love for it, and while loving something does not always translate into being good at it, it does translate into wanting to be good at it and therefore harder work to make it happen.
I suppose, in the end, both are kind of moot -- I have to pay bills in September so I'm going to have to get some sort of job.
Anyone hiring?
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