When I was 6 I decided on my career: I was going to be a doctor, a cross between Albert Schweitzer and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor.

I wanted to help people. In high school and college I worked at the very hospital where Blackwell herself had worked, the first medical college for women in the country. As an assistant in their low-income clinic I saw things I knew I would see in the countries where I expected to spend my years as a physician: the impact of extreme poverty on people’s health.

I’ll never forget the smell of gangrene in the feet of an aging African-American man with diabetes. (He would later need his legs amputated.) I’ll never forget the misery of women pregnant yet again, but unable to afford another child. (Birth control was still not readily available and abortion was illegal in my state.) I’ll never forget a physician I worked with telling me that the baby screaming during his circumcision wasn’t feeling anything. (She lectured me later about toughening up. “You’ll never be a doctor if you cry at every little thing,” she admonished me.)

I was three and a half years into the medical program before I realized that the doctor had been right. I couldn’t be a doctor. I was too empathetic. I did cry over patients. If my medical school classes continued to make me tougher, would I eventually lose the very empathy that had made me want to be a doctor?

I dropped out of college to rethink my life.

For years I’d had only one thought: doctor. Now what? How could I still help people and change the world? Fast-forward 25 years to my career as a journalist and writer. But what happened in between?

In between lay a small nervous breakdown when I left school, and a sense of uncertainty when I returned as a history major in women’s studies. In-between lay a long stint in the domestic Peace Corps, first working with illiterate people in prison and halfway houses, then in rural areas with people so poor that illiteracy was the least of their problems.
Somewhere between trying to be a doctor and doing the next best thing, I found my real career, the work I was destined for: activism.

I realized I had always been an activist; it wasn’t a new career at all. My desire to be a doctor was predicated on my yearning to help others. I had failed at becoming a physician for the very reason I excelled at being an activist: I never got so tough I couldn’t cry over the misery of others.

The Peace Corps asserts that it’s “the hardest job you’ll ever love.” That’s what activism is. Remuneration comes from witnessing change you helped achieve.

I’ve been fortunate; I have actually seen the work I’ve done create change. I never became the physician I had hoped to be, but I’ve had my share of “firsts,” nevertheless. First woman journalist to write about AIDS and women, pediatric AIDS and AIDS as a disease of the poor and people of color. First to write about cancer in the lesbian community. First to publish a book on lesbians and disability. First to write about homeless gays and lesbians. First to write about the cancer-causing pesticide poisoning among farm workers’ children. What I wrote helped bring the plight of some overlooked people to light; once visible, they could no longer be ignored.

Activism has acquired a stigma over the years. It’s not a career like medicine or law. Some consider being an activist a refusal to join the “real” world. But I can think of few worlds as real as the ones I have been privy to as an activist.

I have spent time with women and men imprisoned for life, some of them barely out of their teens. I have held babies whose mothers abandoned them when they found out their infants were HIV positive, babies who didn’t want to let me go because no one ever held them. I have stood looking into the tiny white coffin of a 4-year-old dead from brain cancer caused by the pesticides her farm-worker parents were forced to work with to survive.

Activism is a privilege: You witness society’s worst ills but you also get to share the story of society’s victims with those who have the power to change their lives. It is an awesome responsibility.

It is also sobering. For every action I have taken that has effected change, there are situations that remain unchanged. Pesticides are still killing farmworkers. Despite my tales of gays and lesbians living on the streets, they are still there. The mainstreaming of queers has not prevented a new generation of homeless gay men and lesbians from camping out behind gay bars or in subway tunnels with little to eat and no hope for their futures.

Will you make a lot of money as an activist? Have a nice car, comfortable house and long vacations every year? No. But clichéd as it might sound, the satisfaction that accrues from a career in activism is unmatched by other careers — or at least it has been so for me.

At times I still wish I were a doctor, but I have no regrets about the path I chose. In recent months I have received a series of letters from lesbians who read articles I wrote in Curve about cancer. Each woman was tested after reading my articles; each was diagnosed with cancer.

I may not be the doctor I thought I’d be, but I can still save lives. Activism is the best career I could have chosen. It could be the best career you choose, as well.

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