I grew up in Silicon Valley. There isn’t much room for writers there.

My love for the written word stems from my parents — my two engineer parents, who were the most distant thing from writers, unless you consider them the authors of thousands of lines of code. They fed me books at the same rate with which they fed me meals, and I was always hungry. I remember the urgency with which I devoured the Harry Potter series as a child and how it mirrors the rush with which I just finished The Awakening for the third time.

I went to one school from kindergarten through the end of high school — a school focused almost exclusively on technology, which isn’t surprising when you remember that I grew up in Silicon Valley. To many of my former school's students, the only possible life path consisted of all technology, all the time, and no room for the frivolities that were “everything else.” I was on that path. I got off.

I realized that I don't want my life to consist of one lone, discrete pursuit; that I don't want to teeter-totter between my obligation to become a successful mathematician or scientist or engineer and my passion for writing and reading. I refuse to surrender to this idea of being one and only one thing. There is nothing stopping me from being both. There is nothing stopping me from being it all.

Until now, I have never really thought of myself as a writer. Sure, I dabbled here and there with high school journalism and tore through journals with some vaguely artistic sense of urgency, but I didn’t label myself with the elusive “w-word” because I didn’t feel like I fit the stereotypes it elicited. I couldn’t quote Shakespeare off the tip of my tongue, and I certainly wasn’t going to write life-altering books and agonized poetry in a dimly lit basement. But I now know better, and I know that it’s so scarily simple: if you breathe, you are alive; if you write, you are a writer.

I don’t feel the compulsion to choose anymore.