My friend Jenny, when her son was a toddler, used to say that taking a nap was the most rebellious thing a person could do. I knew exactly what she was talking about. When you nap, you do it despite all the other things you know you should be doing instead. You know the nap will make you feel better, make you more yourself. At the same time you sense that if it feels that good, it must be bad. The little girl in me says, “I’m going to get into trouble.”

Writing is like that for me. I mean my writing—not ghostwriting for clients, not blog posts for my business, not the press release for my husband’s house concert. When I write my writing I am wielding magic: I wave my mystic keyboard and people think differently, or they cry or laugh. I love it. I feel joyous, I feel like myself. I wonder what I can do next. When I have spent a day living my writing life I have spent the morning writing and the evening reading and I feel like I’ve gotten away with something. I feel like my father will come into my office and yell about the dishes not being washed, as he used to do to my siblings and me. So I used to tell myself I would do my writing when everything else was done.

But here’s the thing: everything else is never done.

I would deny myself a little bit everyday and it got to the point where the very nature of what I did had nothing to do with who I am. I had to ask myself, “How do I get back to me, to my writing life?” I found the answer in my convertible. A few years ago I bought a used Mazda Miata. One day, when I no longer worked a 9-to-5 job, I realized I could hop in the Miata and go for a ride up Manhattan’s West Side Highway. With the top down, the sun shining, and the radio blaring I sped along and then I felt it–an awful tingling swirling around in my stomach that warned, “I’m going to get into trouble”. I almost jammed on the brakes! I decided I would have to claim my joy of this car by riding it every single day until the feeling went away.

With my writing the question was the same. Could I claim my joy and live the writing life enough to master the feeling?

So I declared war of a sort by determining the writing life is the way I am going to live my life from now on. Attending the Vermont College of Fine Arts, as I do now, is the equivalent of me staging my very own French Revolution.

I live the writing life because it’s the most rebellious thing I can do. I live the writing life because it is when I am most myself.