If salary didn’t matter, I would still be doing exactly what I’m doing now: writing. I’m an emerging author, and my dream is to become an established one, but the desire isn’t driven by money. Writing is how I make sense of the world and how I share the realities of mental illness, trauma, and healing. I live with bipolar, DID, and ADHD, and I want to give society a clearer, more compassionate understanding of what life with these diagnoses actually looks like.

But my writing isn’t limited to those topics. I love creative expression in all its forms — poetry, fiction, personal reflection — and I’m even teaching myself how to paint, even if I’m far from calling myself an artist. If the salary were the same across all jobs, I’d still choose this path. It’s the one place where I feel most honest, most purposeful, and most myself.