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I could be a doctor right now. I could be a terrible doctor right now. I could be like that doctor I saw once who had to look up everything on the computer because he either had a memory as bad as mine or had never seen a case of anemia before. Maybe he just shouldn’t have been a doctor just like I shouldn’t have. Maybe he didn’t have something else he was interested in. Maybe his brother didn’t introduce him to a guy on the student paper, which would then lose him to journalism for the rest of his life. Maybe he wasn’t as lucky as me. I’m (not) kidding. I wish I was that guy. I don’t. But I do.

Every time I see a story by that doctor who writes for the New Yorker, I think: I would be writing for the New Yorker if I were a doctor.  Every time I see a new book by that Canadian doctor who writes fiction, I think: I would be a best-selling writer if I were a doctor. No one told me I could be both. So I chose one.

I knew I couldn’t be a doctor the day we studied a human cadaver in my university anatomy class. There were harbingers before that – how much science exams made me panic, how appalling I was at chemistry, how even the philosophy of science was something I couldn’t quite manage, even though the arts were otherwise comprehensible to me – but this was the nail. The problem wasn’t the body, per se (I was more disturbed by dissecting a fish than a human and no, I have no interest in exploring why). I had no problem mapping out the human body; I could remember all the names of the muscles and the bones and all the plumbing and that when you die your large intestine might still be full of poo.

The problem was if you moved the body at all, flipped it over or rotated it onto its side, I became lost. This is called a visuo-spatial learning difficulty, an absolute shit heap of a diagnosis I finally got in my twenties. “Children with this disorder might shy away from doing jigsaw puzzles or playing with Legos,” Amy E. Margolis, Ph.D., says on the Columbia website, the top Google hit. “They may have trouble tying their shoes, using scissors, or learning routes or schedules.” I was fine with scissors and tying my shoes, thank you very much. Advanced even. But children with this disorder may also have trouble reading a goddamn clock, causing their kindergarten teacher to throw her hands up in the air because she has had the incredible misfortune of being saddled with the lowest IQ ever recorded in human history. In adulthood, they may be absolutely useless at reading a map. They may be one of those morons who drives off a cliff when Google maps tells them to because their vestigial brain can’t not trust a computer to tell them what to do.

And they may also not be doctors. Considering my disorder, you’d have thought I would have gotten off the fairly non-winding medical path much earlier, but — and this is a really good advertisement for shutting down private schools and siphoning that money into public education — it was camouflaged by the fact that I was at a very small private school where I benefited from extra time and attention. Which is to say, I could have a stealth learning disability because I had access to the kind of resources that allowed me to. I guess I’m thankful. But that school also made me think I could in equal measure be either a doctor or a writer and I chose a doctor because who wouldn’t? (I actually chose it because I respected writers more and didn’t think I was good enough, because being a doctor is less subjective! I thought! I was told!)

I could be neither, clearly. Which is why I chose journalism. I am sort of kidding, again, but also not. Journalism seemed the more practical version of writing, and so here I am. Here I am writing a column in response to “binaries” about not actually becoming a doctor because when someone says “binaries” I still think of “binary fission” which, if you had more agency than me and could choose your own path before 22, you might not know refers to asexual reproduction — the amoeba does this, splitting into two identical halves along with its genetic material, bypassing the cesspool of online dating but not that appalling joke. The fact that I almost went to medical school 20 years ago occasionally occurs to me in unannounced ways like this. I remember recently being about 10 minutes into some dude explaining telomeres to me when I abruptly announced, “I actually did an honors biology degree. I know all that shit,” even though I barely remembered any of it — I mostly just wanted him to shut up. (It worked, which is the most tangible benefit I’ve gotten from my biology degree.)

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The other side of the right decision is just an illusion — in this case, as in most cases, things are not binary. Whichever way you look, the choice is too big to be one.