On Being More Than One Thing

My entire life I have believed that I am incapable of following the path I have felt in my bones that was meant for me.

For a long time, I believed there were certain combinations that simply didn’t work.

Fiction writer and politician felt like one of them.

Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the idea that creativity and governance belonged in separate worlds. That if I wanted to be taken seriously in conversations about policy, power, and leadership, I couldn’t also admit that I wrote novels. And if I wanted to write fiction, especially fiction that explored darker or more ambiguous ideas, I had to give up the notion of public service altogether...especially given the fact that I’m a traditional conservative.

It wasn’t a conclusion I reached after much reflection. It was a quiet assumption…reinforced by other people’s reactions, by professional norms, by a general sense of what was considered “appropriate” ambition, and by what had been drilled into my psyche from the time I was a child.

At the time, I told myself this was practicality. In reality, it was fear.

Fear of being dismissed.
Fear of being seen as unserious.
Fear of being told I was trying to do too much, or worse, that I didn’t understand the rules of the game.

So I narrowed myself. I chose identities that felt legible. Acceptable. Easy to explain in a sentence.

The problem was that my life never actually fit into one lane.

Military service taught me how institutions function under pressure…and how often they fail the people they’re meant to serve.

Policy work deepened my understanding of governance, incentives, and unintended consequences of accepted stagnation.

Writing fiction gave me a way to explore those same ideas without pretending they had clean solutions.

All of it has always been connected.

Fiction didn’t replace my interest in politics. It sharpened it. Writing stories forced me to sit with uncertainty, to examine how people behave when systems break down, when power is abused, when truth is obscured. Those are not abstract concepts. They’re the same questions that sit at the heart of governance, whether we acknowledge them or not.

And yet, for a long time, I treated these parts of myself as incompatible.

I told myself I would circle back to one later. That there would be a “right time” to choose. That ambition had to be singular in order to be credible.

What I eventually realized is that this pressure to choose wasn’t wisdom…it was a form of self-protection.

By limiting myself to one acceptable identity, I could avoid the discomfort of being misunderstood. I could avoid the risk of people deciding I didn’t belong in either space.

But safety has a way of shrinking your life.

Now, as I begin doctoral studies in Law and Policy while continuing to write fiction, I’m no longer interested in pretending that these paths cancel each other out. I don’t see them as competing identities. I see them as different lenses on the same questions: how power operates, how systems shape behavior, and what happens when people are forced to navigate uncertainty without clear answers.

The desire to run for political office one day hasn’t disappeared simply because I write novels. If anything, fiction has made me more attentive to the human cost of policy decisions, more skeptical of tidy narratives, and less interested in easy slogans.

I’m not arguing that everyone should do everything. Nor am I suggesting that ambition should be scattered or unfocused. What I am pushing back against is the idea that we must amputate parts of ourselves in order to be taken seriously.

That idea is a lie…and it’s one that fear tells us in very convincing ways.

I spent years believing that I had to pick one life. Now, I’m more interested in living the whole one.