I am not a risk-taker. One of my best friends described me as the most inflexible person he knows. Another said I was Jim Carrey from the movie Yes Man before he started saying yes to anything.

I’m a creature of habit. I park in the same place every day, even if I have to park ten rows back, just to be sure no one takes my spot. I eat the same Carnation Instant Breakfast every day and even though they changed the name to Carnation Breakfast Essentials years ago, I still call it Instant Breakfast because, well, you get the point.

I’ve always thought of myself as a responsible person. I don’t quit easily. I don’t like to mooch off other people. I resist change. I value financial stability. I don’t desire fame. I married a beautiful, rational, practical, risk-averse, accountant. I spent nine years getting three degrees in civil engineering. I spent another four years earning my license. I had a respectable job with a good company and co-workers I admired.

I might be the least likely person to push the brakes on a successful and stable career in favor of a job that I am completely unqualified for and has enormous competition. And yet, that is exactly what I did when I quit my job to write a book. Over the next few weeks, I’d like to share my story with you.

The Awkward Poet

My first meaningful entry into the world of writing came as a hormone-crazed teenager. I found myself stuck in a predictable pattern:

1. I would “fall in love” in the teenage sense.
2. She would not be interested in any sense.
3. To make myself feel better, I would write a pitiful or overly sweet poem declaring my feelings.

I wrote instant classics, like “Scars” and “Do You Like My Hair?” Most of these poems bounced around aimlessly between synonyms of ‘beautiful’ and ‘pain’. Just to give you an idea, I present for the first time ever:

Writing was an outlet for me, a way to search myself and make sense of what I found. Some weeks, I wrote a poem every night until the hurt had passed. I knew these poems would never be commercially successful or have any literary value, but I wrote them anyway. I wrote them for me. To this day, I’m the only person who’s read most of them, which, judging from the sample above is probably best for everyone.

I was a prolific writer when I was feeling down or lonely. But, when things were going well, I didn’t need to write. If all you had were my high school poems, you’d think I had died in a gutter somewhere, but I actually loved high school. I had great friends and great inspiration for writing, even if the end product left something to be desired. I eventually found that ever elusive requited love, and my writing went mostly dormant. 

The Lifelong Student

When I graduated high school, I had two academic interests: English and math. Surely, I wasn’t talented enough to earn a living as a writer, so I went to school for engineering.

My first semester of college, I signed up for an honor’s Victorian literature class, along with a full slate of freshman engineering courses. I went to the first lecture, saw the reading list, and promptly dropped the class. I have never been a fast reader. If I had done nothing but read the whole semester, I still wouldn’t have finished all those books. That was the last English class of my life.

Engineering, on the other hand, went well. I was drawn to structural engineering by the thrill of one day strolling through a city of buildings and bridges I helped create. I loved that no matter how complicated the application, the physics behind structural behavior is usually straightforward. In math, simplicity is beauty.

As I approached graduation, I realized I was enjoying school too much to give it up for a real job. I’m the kind of person who likes to learn, and I knew I had a lot left to learn in my field. So I applied for grad school and got a teaching and research assistantship. Incidentally, when I took the GRE exam, I did well in math, okay in verbal, and terrible in writing. But who cares? Engineers don’t need to write, right?

Grad school was hard but great. Classes were intense, teaching was rewarding, and research, which mostly consisted of breaking stuff, was exciting. Two years later, when I again faced the choice of industry or more school, I thought: why not go for the PhD and stay in school forever?

I didn’t fully appreciate the difference between the letters MS and PhD. The classes were similar, the work was similar, but the expectations were vastly different. The fun I had breaking stuff was replaced with beating my head against a wall model with finite element analysis. If you know what that means, great, I don’t need to explain it to you. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter, just be glad it was me and not you.

If you’re trying to solve a problem worth solving, you will likely encounter days when it seems unsolvable. I had more than my share of those days. Despite all the resources at my disposal, I sometimes felt utterly alone and totally lost. But I didn’t give up. When one thing didn’t work, I tried something else. Eventually, something worked.

I was also extremely fortunate in my choice of adviser. He is one of the best men I’ve ever met, and if all else failed, I knew he had my back. He taught me some of the most important lessons of my professional life: how to tackle complex problems, how to teach difficult concepts, and how to write concisely. Weren’t expecting that last one, were you? Even engineers need to communicate.

The most important bit of communication for my degree was the dissertation. It’s not enough to research something. Your work is meaningless to your field if you don’t share it. My dissertation won’t win any literary awards, but it taught me perseverance, and some say: “the best dissertation is a done dissertation.” Is that true of debut novels?

The Professional Engineer

After grad school, Plan A was a tenure-track professorship. I applied to a few schools, but something in my gut didn’t feel right. I found myself hoping I wouldn’t get a call back. If you’ve ever been in that position, you know how crushing that feels.

Eventually, instead of staying in academia, I accepted a job offer with a consulting firm that designs buildings. I soon realized how little I knew about buildings. I thought I’d quickly rise to the top with my advanced degrees and problem-solving skills. I was wrong. It turns out, a lot of engineers don’t get advanced degrees and do just fine in industry, and my company was filled with smart and talented people.

But, I kept my head down and my chin up and <insert the cliché of your choice here>. I got over myself and worked hard. I was reasonably productive, very thorough, and tried to make the world a safer place one correctly-designed timber beam at a time.

One of the quirks of engineering is that you’re not supposed to call yourself an engineer until you’re licensed, so even after nine years of school and three years of practice, I was still just an intern. After finally obtaining the required years of experience and passing an exam, I earned my license and could replace that silly “EI” (Engineering Intern) on my business card with “PE” (Professional Engineer). 

Despite the forward movement of my career, I would often come home from work tired and anxious. I had a nagging feeling that something wasn’t right, that I wasn’t where I should be. The hardest part was not knowing why. I was working on interesting buildings all over town, just like I thought I wanted. The work itself was diverse enough not to be boring, but repetitive enough to find a nice rhythm. I had solid relationships with my coworkers and superiors.

Sure, there were things I didn’t like, but there are things in any job I wouldn’t like. I couldn’t point to any one thing that would be substantially better if I jumped ship to another company or sector. I looked at job postings from time to time but wasn’t excited about any of them. I wanted a change but felt paralyzed. I needed something or someone to nudge me free . . .

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