Backstory: If You've Ever Wanted To Quit Your Job and Follow Your Dream

People are really nice when I tell them I'm writing a novel. They're very curious and wish me a lot of luck, which I do appreciate. But what starts a more interesting conversation is when I tell them that I left my promising (I was hoping) career in marketing to write a novel.

"You did!? Really!?"

Yes, I left a very good job as a Marketing Director in a prestigious, well-led firm in Manhattan, after getting an expensive MBA. It took me more than a year to make the decision and included a tearful transatlantic phone call to my husband and a Bangladeshi taxi driver reading my palm. After all, the rest of America was happy to have any kind of job that paid a salary. Every morning I woke up to news stories about unemployment and "the worst economic situation since the Great Depression." No sane person would ever have left a job in the last three years. But eventually, there was no other choice for me.

Like a lot of big decisions, this one had a long, agonizing build-up and then a cosmic moment when the universe had me by the tail.

The build-up consisted of a lot of opportunities for me to write and me walking away from them because a little voice in my head uttered various stupidities like "it's going to be too hard," "it's not practical, you can't earn a living," "so few people ever succeed at writing," "you only like to write poetry anyway so just do that in your spare time," etc. I'm sure there was more dream-crushing chatter that I can't remember in specifics, but I know I listened to all of it.

But the notion that I was supposed to be a writer flowed in and out of my life like a piece of lightweight trash on the beach. It wouldn't go away. In my younger days, I was the editor-in-chief of our yearbook in high school. I wrote for our town's newspaper during the summers. I wrote a few articles for my college yearbook and a guest column once for the college newspaper. I continued to write a lot of poetry. I started submitting poems for contests in the waning years of the Clinton Administration, to no success. While I lived in Poland in the late 90s, I published a travel article in the expat rag The Warsaw Insider, full of advice about what to see and do in Nicholas Copernicus's hometown of Torun, Poland. I worked in Paris for a few years and thought of poems faster than I could write them down. But nowhere in any of this was I working towards the goal of building any credentials or establishing myself as a published writer. Why? I'm not sure. Probably it seemed like too much of a long shot. Why try? It's like Lotto. Why waste your dollar?

The weekend before I moved to Warsaw, Poland, in a job transfer with my company, somebody asked me why on earth I would want to move there. I gave the expected answer: why not, it will be fun. The real answer I kept tucked in my head, another piece of lightweight trash, was: there had to be a story in it.

And for the last ten years I've been scribbling out notes, paragraphs and pages about that story. But marriage came, then a promotion, then a child, then another promotion, then another child and I turned around in 2009 and realized I wasn't going in the direction I wanted to be going in. I was ankle-deep in the lightweight beach trash of my life's dream and I couldn't move. I hadn't written a poem in four years. I couldn't write anymore because there were too many people in my life and work needing things from me, as they should. I had created this intricate net of "grown-up" responsibilities. When quiet time did come, my mental landscape was a wasteland. I was too tired to form a creative thought. It felt like the inertia of being a grown-up was starting to carry me away. And I was about to let it. Isn't that what I was supposed to do anyway, be a grown-up? And also, other grown-ups can handle all this responsibility and write too, so what's wrong with me? I figured something just had to be wrong with me. Laziness. So I plowed ahead, working, meeting my responsibilities, not writing.

On July 14th of that year, Bastille Day (a precious little day for this francophile), I met my friend Susan for a very early breakfast at L'Express on Park Avenue South. We talked about our lives, and she patiently listened to me tell her, not for the first time, about how "one day" I was going to actually get serious and write that story about Poland, and lots of other stories, too. After breakfast, we hugged goodbye on the corner of PAS and 28th Street. The sky was that bottomless blue that always reminds me of 9/11.

Then Abdul picked me up in his yellow taxi and, unbeknownst to me, the universe took over. This is what I can remember, more or less, of that conversation:

"Where you going?"

"World Financial Center, please."

"What you do?"

"I'm in marketing."

"Oh, that's good. I got my degree in marketing, see?" Abdul produces a folded photocopy of a degree that he keeps behind his visor from a school, I assume, in Bangladesh. In the next minute, he produces a few more photocopied degrees: in history, philosophy and linguistics. He seems very proud of himself and I want to encourage him.

"Congratulations, that's great. What do you want to do?"

"I don't know. I think about it now. I drive and also I read people's fortune."

Oh. Well, those degrees could come in handy for that I guess.

"You have a very nice face," he says, looking at me in his rear view mirror with the crinkly eyes of his smile showing. I bristle a little because I don't like being come on to, or even the hint of it. I'm fair and blonde and have been a fascinating little object for many a dirty old man. Rebuffing them over the years has probably put a slight chill on my personality. "Give me your hand," he demands. I'm not really up for it, but then I look out at the bottomless sky as the warm egg and toast of my croque madame sits with a pleasant weight in my stomach, the taste of bechamel still on my tongue, and I decide what the hell.

I stick my hand through the window next to his headrest and he grabs my palm authoritatively when we get to a stoplight.

"This line here is very strong. You are creative."

Yes, I guess I like to think I am.

"You have great loves in your life. Three great loves."

Well, OK, probably that would be my husband and two sons.

"But you are unhappy now. Something is frustrating you. You are searching for something."

Yes, Abdul, I am. The light changes and Abdul drives ahead a few blocks until we get to another red light. He grabs my hand again.

"Here, look at this line. You will be famous. This line only famous people have it. I read Gwyneth Paltrow's hand once and she has this line."

OK, I like the sound of that. But I'm sure he says that to all the girls.

"See this one, this long one. Ahaa."

"What is it?" I'm worried it says I will die in a taxi accident while my driver is reading my palm.

"It says you are a writer."

When he spoke the words I felt kicked back in my seat. It was too specific for it to be just something he says to everybody. He didn't know anything about me. Just that I worked in marketing at the World Financial Center. But he looked at my hand and said I was a writer. The bottomless sky seemed to gather this force over me like a vacuum and I was at once sucked into it. The universe had me by the tail, and I was glad. I wasn't struggling anymore. I knew what I had to do.

When Abdul dropped me off and handed me my change, he said one more, sadly prescient, thing. "You aren't mean enough to work in one of these places. Good luck to you miss."

I wanted to hug Abdul, the man who I had only minutes earlier felt like rebuffing. I wanted to make him get out of his seat and stand in the middle of the street and hug me, amid the idling black Town Cars and the traders rushing into the NYMEX. Instead he offered me his email address and I took it, and I promised to write to him when I published a book.

I ran inside my building, up the elevator to the 28th floor and closed myself into a conference room to call my husband. I told him what Abdul said. I started crying while I apologized for not being good enough to "do it all" - play grown-up and write, too.

And then he said the best thing one spouse can ever say to another: "Go for it."