You Don’t Have to Choose One Life

I graduated from Hargrave Military Academy knowing three things I wanted to be. A teacher, a photographer, and a preacher. Not in any particular order, not with any clarity about how those three things would fit together, just a seventeen-year-old kid with three different versions of what a meaningful life could look like. And every single adult I talked to gave me the same speech. Teaching doesn’t pay, so you’ll need to marry well. Photography is too competitive, you’ll never make a living at it. Preaching requires that you accept institutional religion and you’ve already told me you don’t trust that. So pick one. Build one life around one identity. Don’t try to do everything at once because you’ll fail at everything instead of succeeding at one thing.

I believed them. For forty years, I mostly believed them. Teaching is what I did. I built my identity around teaching. I became an excellent teacher. I helped hundreds of students see what was possible in their own work and their own lives. And I told myself that this was enough. This had to be enough. Because you can’t be a teacher and a photographer and a preacher. That’s not a life. That’s three separate delusions about what you could possibly accomplish. So I chose teaching and I let the other two ideas go.

But around a decade into teaching, I finally admitted to myself that I missed photography. I’d been teaching graphic design, which is adjacent to photography, which is like eating a picture of food when you’re hungry. It’s not the same thing. So I started going to photography events. I met photographers. I met national award-winners and people who were trying to figure it out and people who lived and breathed the medium. Someone asked me what I shot, and I said, “A Nikon,” and then they asked me if I was serious, and I realized I didn’t have a good answer. So I became serious. I got proper equipment. I surrounded myself with photographers who were better than I was. I shot every day. And suddenly I wasn’t a teacher who used to take pictures. I was a teacher who was also a photographer, and I’d been wrong about the need to choose one.

The preaching came later, years later, when I was in my sixties. A friend of mine became an ordained minister to perform someone’s wedding, paid twenty-five dollars online, got a certificate, and I thought, well, I was already a teacher, I’d been a photographer for a decade, why not? Nobody told me you could do all of them. Nobody told me that three separate identities could actually be one integrated life. So I became ordained. Nothing fancy, nothing institutional, just a way to say what I actually believed about people and meaning and how you spend your time. And suddenly I wasn’t a teacher who sometimes took pictures. I was a teacher, a photographer, and a preacher, and all three of those things were true at the same time.

The lie that institutions tell you is that you have to choose one life and be excellent at it, and that if you try to do multiple things you’ll be mediocre at all of them. But what’s actually true is that the three things I wanted to be at seventeen, they’re all the same thing. They’re all about attention. They’re all about looking at something and actually seeing it and helping other people see it too. Teaching is about seeing a student and noticing what they’re actually capable of. Photography is about seeing light and shadow and moments and capturing what they mean. Preaching is about seeing a community and helping them understand what matters. When you realize that the core of all three is the same, you don’t have to choose anymore. You can do all of them.

It took me forty years to figure this out. I wasted four decades believing that identity was singular, that I had to pick one lane and stay in it, that trying to be multiple things was evidence of not being serious about any of them. But what if the people who seem the most interesting, the most alive, the most useful in the world are interesting specifically because they have multiple ways of engaging with it? What if the photographer who’s also a teacher teaches better because they know how to see? What if the teacher who’s also a preacher connects better with students because they’ve figured out how to talk about meaning? What if the preacher who’s also a photographer has something to say that actually lands because they understand composition and light and how to make an invisible idea visible?

The years I spent choosing, the years I spent telling myself I had to be one thing, those were the years I wasn’t actually being any of the three things as fully as I could have. I was being a teacher who felt guilty about not being a photographer. I was being a photographer who felt guilty about not being a preacher. I was being all of them halfway because I was convinced that doing them fully would require failing at the others. And then I just decided I didn’t care about being right anymore. I decided that if I failed at all three, well, at least I would have actually tried. At least I would have lived like the person I was at seventeen, the person who wanted all three things, instead of living like the person I became at thirty-eight who believed I had to pick just one.

You don’t have to choose one life. You get to build a life that’s actually complicated and multifaceted and makes room for all the things you want to be. It’s harder. It requires you to stop listening to the people who want you to pick a lane and stay in it. It requires you to accept that you’ll never be the world’s best at any single thing because you’re investing your attention in multiple directions. But you’ll be the world’s only version of the thing that combines all of them. You’ll be the photographer-teacher-preacher, or the engineer-artist, or the doctor-writer, or whatever combination of identities actually represents the full version of who you are. And that person is worth so much more than any sanitized, simplified version of yourself that fits neatly into a single category. So find what you wanted to be at seventeen, all the versions of it, and then give yourself permission to do all of them.