When I was six years old someone asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” At that age, living in a small Georgia town in the 1950s, I could only think of four careers for women - they were the only stories I knew: teacher, nurse, secretary, and housewife. I picked nurse.

From that moment on, I began to get little nurse kits for my birthdays. The librarian at school set aside the biography of Florence Nightingale for me. If someone cut their finger, I was called in as the designated bandager. At sixteen, my parents arranged for me to be a volunteer at the local hospital. Everyone expected me to be a nurse, and I was like wet cement taking on the expectations.

I got my Bachelor’s degree in nursing and worked nine years - even taught nursing in a college - before I stopped and said to myself, “This is not who I am. I am not really a nurse inside.

I’m a writer.” By that time, the cement had hardened and I had some jackhammer work to do, breaking up the old identity embedded within and releasing a new self. I had continued with nursing, not because it is a noble profession that stirred my deep gladness, but because I did not want to risk upsetting others’ — not to mention my own — ingrained notion of who I was. I wanted to please. I wanted to protect myself from the uncertainty of starting over. In such ways our consciousness becomes centred in the outer roles and masks we wear, rather than in the True Self within. — Beliefnet.com