10/14 After graduating in computer science, I applied for a position in my professor’s department. The application was accepted, I received an offer, and I accepted the offer. It was at this point – everything laid out for a clear, solid future – that the doubts crept in. What was I doing with my life? This same university, this same department, this same city, and these same friends? I realized I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror.

But how could I do it? How could I possibly say this to my professor and back out of the contract I had already signed? I couldn’t tell him to his face. I wrote what I had to say on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope. I booked a meeting during his office hours. (Or did I just knock on the door and walk in?) I gave him the envelope and asked him to read it in my presence.

He asked what I was planning to do instead. My answer involved the maximally embarrassing, totally indefensible words “I write,” and he had the decency not to ask anything more specific. He said something to the effect of (well, he actually used these exact words): “If you see your star moving across the horizon, follow it.”

He continued to let me work in his department as an assistant so I could get by over the next few months. And then he wrote me a reference for a PhD program in Berlin I wanted to apply for. He gave it to me in a sealed envelope, which I handed in with my application.