Princess, doctor or author

I used to think that I had my entire life planned out — laid before me as if it were a map and I was a pirate in search of gold; I would feel my finger swiftly trace the path in front of me. I always knew that I wanted to be a princess. Golden castles, sparkling gowns and a kingdom that adored me: What more could a little girl want? But my dream wasn’t just about jeweled crowns and shimmering tiaras. No; I wanted to be the kind of princess that cared for my people like my favorites: Mulan and Jasmine. I would imagine wandering through the halls of my castle and diligently partaking in royal meetings with countless advisors to make sure that no one in my kingdom ever suffered. I would be wise, kind, beautiful and generous: the sort of ruler every fairy tale promised.

However, as I grew older, my vision of becoming a princess evolved as a 10-year-old me contemplated my awful luck of not being born into a royal family. Somewhere along the path of growing up, I realized that real-life royalty didn’t quite work in the way I had envisioned. There were no knights on quests, enchanted forests or magical decrees that could erase suffering. But I still grasped onto the idea of helping people — I just needed a new way to do it.

That’s when I discovered my love for medicine, which felt like its own kind of magic in the beginning. Instead of wandering through enchantments and spells, I found myself lost among formulas and theories. If I couldn’t be a princess who ruled over a kingdom, maybe I could be a doctor who ruled over disease. Instead of waving a scepter, I could wield knowledge; instead of issuing royal decrees, I could prescribe treatments that would save lives.

I threw myself into this new dream with the same fervor I had once reserved for tiaras and fairy tales. I devoured books about anatomy and medicine, watched documentaries about surgeons performing life-saving procedures, was inspired by Dr. Strange’s obsession with neuroscience and proudly announced to anyone who would listen that I would be a doctor when I grew up. In my mind, it made sense. I wanted to help people, and what better way to do that than by treating them?

That was until my love for stories began to bubble up once more. I always loved how they had the power to make people feel. There was always something magical about the way that worlds could be created from nothing and how lives could be manifested from ink on paper. It was remarkable how stories could help people understand one another in a way that data and facts couldn’t. I was obsessed with how narratives were able to connect, understand and heal in ways that even science wasn’t able to. 

For a long time, I had always thought that medicine was the perfectly cobbled path laid in front of me, that to love medicine was to sacrifice every bit of my passion for the humanities. No longer would I be able to throw myself into worlds filled with pixies and mysterious aliens or lose myself in the rhythm of a well-crafted sentence. 

But the more I tried to push aside my love for stories, the more my books would scream my name. Soon, I found myself scribbling short stories in the margins of my chemistry notebooks during lectures and crafting intricate narratives about the people behind the medical cases that I studied. 

Confronting this part of my identity was terrifying. For my whole life, I always thought that I needed to walk an unbent path. Each phase of my life was entirely planned before me, and I was convinced that I needed a distinct destination and a perfect idea of my identity. But now? Now, I’ve realized that I need something that is uniquely mine. I have realized that I no longer want to leave behind one dream for another. I want to find a way to love both science and stories in a way that will allow me to help others. 

Perhaps this means that I can write about science to make it more accessible to the world. Perhaps it means that I must use storytelling to educate, inspire and change lives in a way that medicine wouldn’t be able to. Perhaps I will have to find a completely new way to combine the two subjects that I love the most. While I don’t know what the future may hold, I do know that my journey will never be a straight path. But if there is one element that has, and will, never change about my story, it’s that I will never stop wanting to help others. More than any title (whether it’s princess, doctor or author), that is what defines who I am.

Kaylee Nguyen is a freshman from Pensacola, Fla. studying Molecular & Cellular Biology and Writing Seminars.