This week, filling out a form at the dentist, for the first time ever got to put “writer” as my occupation. It was both exhilarating and terrifying.

It’s been just over one month since I cleared out my office, sent out my last bill, and closed my psychotherapy practice to pursue writing and stay-at-home motherhood. Driving home that evening in a car full of manila folders and herbal tea and art supplies, I felt a long lost feeling, one that I would wash over me when I would travel alone and feel so deeply grounded in myself and yet so free—a sense of self, naked and unapologetic, moving with the world in a way that only I can. I felt as though I were in the wilderness: vulnerable yet strong and aware and focused, both afraid and comforted by the openness of the sky, by the uncovered earth in all its textures and sounds and smells against my skin.

Psychotherapy was never my calling, and I knew that. But it was a good job. It was everything I considered important; it was meaningful, impactful, challenging, dynamic, introspective, and even a little bit edgy. And I wanted to be all those things. I wanted people to see me as those things. To see me as interesting, see me as making a difference, and, well, to see my as an expert. To have acronyms behind my name, custom printed on my door. I was good at it, too. And for the most part, I enjoyed it.

Until my son was born.

There used to be so much room. Room for divergent paths, for trying on ways to walk through the world: dress pants and matching socks and blouses that made me look older. Older and wiser and more serious. There was room for jobs as journeys, explorations into myself and the world, as though they were caves and ruins and hidden mountain villages—forgotten corners of human experience. My twenties were for wandering, discovering, understanding. Many of those explorations happened on my path through graduate school and licensure and non-profit work and, eventually, starting my own practice. My twenties were full of room. Room to travel, room to meet people, room to work late and invest in training and take colleagues out to lunch.

Room to see what it was like. What it all was like.

Now that room is gone. Gone is the room in which to gather professional experience for its own sake when I know perfectly well it isn’t in the direction of my calling. Gone is room to work for fun or ego or routine, to work when work gives me something but doesn’t give me that one thing, that thing that makes me come deeply alive, feeling the core of my being in line with the universe. With paying to be away from my son almost equal to my income, and with having a finite amount of loving energy to spend on those in my life, if I don’t have to work a job out of passion or financial need, I won’t. And I am privileged to have that choice.

I am so privileged, and wish everyone could have my choice.

And so now there is a different kind of room. The kind of room you find in surrender. In singing and rocking, rocking and singing over and over, hour after hour in the middle of the night. In saying “here we are, for better or worse.” In finally acknowledging that there is no escape from the present moment, and that nothing is in control. It’s the room you find in those sweet free moments, when, without the luxury of wasting time, you feel gratitude for that shower, or that phone call, or that time to do the work you truly love. Room in the simplicity of life: dishes clean and dirtied and cleaned again. Half the day spent nourishing yourself and your family with good food. Walking the same path day after day with the dog, as each day, he smells something new. And you see something new. And the baby laughs at something new, and you wish he could tell you all about it, though, in a way, he does.

It is in this spaciousness that my new practice, my practice of being a writer, could finally be born. And I continue to work, this time alone, without officemates or busywork to keep me company or binders to remind me what to do. I work and I introduce myself at parties without the luxury of being taken seriously, at least by those who don’t understand. I work, letting go of the reality that many don’t consider my work valid or valuable or interesting, both mothering and writing. I work towards an invisible calling, relying over and over on myself to validate my choice, when others around me wonder what happened. As if I’ve abandoned feminism. As if a masters in psychology spent on motherhood and self-growth is wasted.

Perhaps I’ve shocked people. I get it; I’ve shocked myself. Nothing like a baby to wake you up to where you’re faking it–to where you’re deceiving even to your own brain, heart, and spirit. Because this baby is as real as anything I’ve come to know in my life. He’s shown me what real is. What real feels like. And much as I’ve hated it at times, I can’t deny the depth and richness of living in this authenticity.

So here we go.