Read more: The Great Migration: Contours of Walking Away from One Career to Another

It’s funny — how what we always dreamed of being becomes antithetical to who we actually are.

I won’t say that the thought doesn’t bother me — it does, greatly — but there is a calmness to it, too. A steady, subtle warmth that heralds growth.

Switching careers is not something I’m unfamiliar with. I’m something of a jack of all trades — always have been and always wanted to be. People may have seen my shifts as erratic, but they all had a purpose and ending, especially now as they’re on the cusp of coming together at the price of abandoning something I chased so hard.

But that’s it, isn’t it? If you have to chase something, it isn’t meant to be yours.

That doesn’t make the death of a dream any easier.

Growing up, I always had this profound love of law and justice. If there were two things I loved most in this world it was writing and defending others from wrongdoing through writing, particularly by working with law and history. I continuously romanticized Democracy and American politics and saw its raw potential through all its dark, twisty injustices. I was convinced Democracy was an experiment that could be fixed and redone again and again. It just needed the right people to help it.

I convinced myself that I was meant to be one of those people. Particularly, through my passion for writing.

But passion? It needs structure to thrive. Realistic limits. I became convinced that structure could only be found by becoming a lawyer.

So, I did it — the whole thing: worked for a government agency, and non-profit(s), and completed law school. A new leg of my career began.

Ironic — how beginnings and endings carry that same frenetic flutter in your chest.

In my experience, American lawyering is a special blend of people committed to a lifetime of bandaids and bulletholes. You’ll find do-gooders motivated to use the existing system to flush out injustice, but many of them become a by-product of the very system they want to fix, primarily because they are so focused on political mechanisms. It is particularly rampant in DC, where the administration determines the tone of everything. Whatever side is in office has their own ideas, while the opposing side has theirs. Each thinks their own way — old, new, in between — is the correct one. Unfortunately, they’re both wrong because they both cling to a system that continues to do the same thing — endlessly oscillating between extremes — without actually fixing anything.

Fixing things other people broke doesn’t work. It never has, which was why Democracy started in the first place: monarchies weren’t protecting people, weren’t working for people. A new system was created. Unfortunately, it carried enough of the old to fall into the same traps. Democracy became a mask for a diluted monarchy where everyday people are ignored and pushed aside for larger state and individual financial interests. Until there is a reckoning of values — not dissimilar to those debated in 1776 — fixing what exists won’t work.

This larger realization around Democracy lent itself to what, exactly, was going wrong with my legal career. It made me realize how tired I was of trying to fix things other people broke. That’s not how I wanted to spend my life, and it was certainly not who I was becoming. I spent years fixing others’ friendships, relationships, and caring for others. And recovering from that? It also took years. I found my personal growth interweaving with my professional growth, which ultimately led to a career schism.

In the end, I am arriving where I am supposed to: a life of building. To create through writing, and teaching others that their potential lies beyond what this system tells us to believe. What our minds, patterns, and leaders tell us to follow. By showing others that there is always more, and it’s waiting for you, no matter what anyone says. It is a freeing realization that feels like coming home.

It feels scary, too. Abandoning something you devoted so much time, effort to feels like a betrayal to everything you’ve ever done, to all the years you’ve put in. But the greater betrayal is devoting your future to things that no longer feel real to you. It’s like a partnership: you can’t sustain what is taking from you without getting something in return, no matter how hard you try. Careers need a give and take.

It’s hard to walk away without feeling like you failed. But you didn’t — you have to experience things in order to see the larger picture. Like a hawk that circles above, you have to see and taste the possibilities before you land. Maybe that means circling a lot. But you’ll arrive on time, when your next chapter is meant to unfold for you.