What surprises me is that I feel most at home in the non-verbal. We’re all born there, and it seems I have not left. Often, I feel completely inarticulate, every word dredged from the depths of my consciousness, dragging seaweed and stinking of rot. Other times, words fly out with ease, and I think of the frog revered by the Haida people for the ease of its transitions from water to land to air, through which it soars with legs and fingers spread wide.

At first, doing something useful with my life meant training myself for a job in the social sciences. Literature, I thought, was for fun. I’d spent most of my childhood immersed in books. I‘d lie in the top bunk, reading through the night, thrilled by a turn of phrase, sometimes even a single word, chosen to describe how a cloud moves across the sky or a feeling across a person’s face, thinking, yes, that is it, that is it exactly. (James Joyce, to describe a dog trotting away on a sun-drenched beach, chose twinkling shanks) What was it about that perfect alignment of words with life? A veil slid off, and there was the world, luminous and real, naked. Or perhaps I myself was stripped bare so that life could touch me with its amazing reality, and in that moment, I became the touching and the knowing and nothing else.

Perhaps because books took me so far beyond my own life and personality, I never connected them with my personal future or vocation. But after college, when I dedicated myself to what I considered a useful job, I found it hard to breathe. In the evenings, I escaped to a sculpture class, creating abstract forms out of clay. During the day, I focused on regression analysis. My boss remarked—with a wry smile—on the elegant style of my report on the economic ramifications of European unification. Clearly, the attention to language was out of place. It made me think of medieval monks and their manuscripts. I imagined my tables of stats engulfed by gorgeous borders of flowering vines, fantastical creatures half-hidden, eating the fruits.

There was no problem with the report. It did the job. But could I go from 9 to 5 without breathing? It was a question that needed no answer.