I wore black and white checked capris with elastic suspenders lined with protest buttons. Give peace a chance. Make art not war. I (heart) New York. My shirt was an old Hanes undershirt I had scribbled on with sharpie markers. Pictures of a paintbrush, drama masks, music notes, a book. Words like creative, love, music, earth. It was career day and I was ready.

Sister Diane passed a microphone around the room, asking each student what their costume represented. A nurse. A doctor. A firefighter. My palms sweated as the mic made its way toward me. It was heavier than I expected.

“I’m going to be an individualist.”

The teachers didn’t smile at me like at the other kids’ ambitions. My school saw no virtue in deviation.

Most of us pursue the destinies someone else told us we wanted. We go after the white picket fence, the 401k, the American Dream, although many of us don’t stake our worth on whitewashed posts, never retire from our labors of love or didn’t dream the way they told us to, in the first place.

I pursued the “practical” journalism degree a school counselor suggested. A decade or so later, I sat sweating in my conservative suit, staring across my mahogany desk piled with press releases and news clippings at the decorations I’d brought to my government office, where I spent my days writing press releases, speeches and columns under someone else’s name.

“What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?”

A friend had given me a black journal with that saying on the front upon my graduation from high school. It sat next to a troll doll in a sequined red cape, a defiant smile on his rubber face. Despite, or perhaps because the diaphanous butterfly on his head, he was inarguably male.

“That’s whimsical,” my boss said, gesturing to the troll. She was the sort of woman who got practical haircuts. “Most people just bring in pictures of their families.”

But I wasn’t most people, although I pretended to be. I pulled on my staid polyester separates every morning, wrote words that came out of my head but not my mouth. One day, my eyes caught the notebook, my head remembered my middle school promise and my heart wondered how I had ended up living someone else’s dream.

Several weeks later, I handed in my government ID, packed up my desk and left to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing. Although I have since wandered through hallways hung with equal amounts of happiness and heartbreak, I never looked back.

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

Today, I sit in my studio at the Vermont Studio Center, where I am spending six weeks writing in the snowy hills where life distractions can’t find me. That same notebook sits on my desk, full of scribbles on the kaleidoscopic snow falling outside my window, the river chortling over the rocks, the sense of calm that comes from the writer’s life I have chosen against all “practical” inclinations.

I am a reporter at a small-town newspaper, telling stories that matter to that demographic. I am a writing teacher, guiding others toward the best way to share their stories. I am writer, who finally knows what makes my heart beat when I think about what that means.

When most people consider rebellion, they see smoke bombs, shouted slogans and waving signs. I hear the voice that whispers in the silence of desperation, when it is given the space to recall what the spirit wants, independent of everyone else’s expectations.

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?