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For my entire adult life I've believed that if I were a writer I could be a Somebody. I studied for years to become a physician, yet in the recesses of my heart, I believed that doctoring was meant merely to support my writing. The more stressful my life was, the more I dreamed of writing. The more attention and time I spent on patients, the more I wanted to put my words on paper. Yet every time I'd stray away from medicine, take time off to write, the words wouldn't come.

I envied writers who won National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes; that was the level of work I aspired to. No wonder I froze when I had the chance to write. I wasn't going to settle for anything less than perfection. After all, how could I reveal myself so utterly unless my writing was faultless? My writing would determine my worth.

When I was well into my 40's I met my husband and had my first child. I worked full time to heal my husband's traumas, learned to juggle marriage and family, and learned to trust myself as a mother. Along the way I changed my specialty from family practice to psychiatry. I work two days a week, spend hours connecting with patients and their therapists, volunteer in my son's classroom, and dabble with gardening, reading, writing. My son and I laugh and play and get chores done together. My husband and I make time for dates and touch. And gradually, over these years my need to be a public Somebody, has faded.

I've realized that defining myself in relation to anonymous readers does little to solidify my own identity. I cannot know what a reader thinks of me, cannot control how I come across to them, cannot grow from a relationship that is necessarily one sided. But perhaps more importantly, my identity - as a wife, as a mother, a parent, a teacher, and even as a doctor - has attained new dimensions. In giving myself to those closest to me I've become a person I like, a person who can be appreciated without the substantiation of public accolades.

And just as I've given myself to others in order to find myself within, my writing has become freed. I don't need my writing to make me a Somebody any more. I can let it spin and fly out into the world and not worry so much where it lands. I can turn away from my writing and look into my son's eyes, or laugh with patients, or hold my husband, and know that I am whole. I no longer need you, my reader, to tell me I am a Somebody in order to be one.

Learn more about this author, Harriet Squier.
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