The summer I got my pilot's license.

When people ask me why I left science and became a writer, this is why.

Picture: flying solo into Delaware, August 19, 2003.

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Many of you expressed surprise, rightly, when I mentioned in this post that I learned to fly a plane twenty years ago. *I'm* still surprised when I remember it!—even though the reason was very clear at the time: I wanted to be an astronaut, and most successful astronaut candidates have flight experience. I'd just graduated college and was due to start at MIT in two months. I wouldn't be able to learn to fly in a major metro area. So it was clear what I had to do before then. I was fast-tracking myself so I wouldn't have a chance to second-guess myself.

But after I jumped that track, I wrote a whole essay about the experience of learning to fly (and why I didn't want to continue). I submitted it to This American Life. This was back in the heyday of MediaBistro, when it was kinda-sorta-still-maybe possible to make a living as an online journalist. That was my whole plan: to support myself with journalism, while I wrote fiction.

While we all recover from our laughing fit, I'll say that This American Life rejected the essay. But it was my first real attempt at narrative, and I'm so glad I wrote it. Over the years, I've half-remembered this essay and thought, "I should really share this with my patrons." But apparently I never did. So I'm finally doing it now.

I just reread it, and it mostly holds up. (Mostly....I didn't know what 'pithy' meant. I still thought it was related to 'pittance.') But it's very much a snapshot of a pivotal window in my life. When people ask me why I left science to become a writer, this is the longform answer of 'why.'

(The shortform answer is: 'those fucking stalls.')

The essay is pasted below, and also linked at the end, as a PDF and a PDF formatted for Kindle.