Sitting in the doctor’s lounge with the other OB/GYN physicians while I waited for a patient to deliver, I tore off the plastic wrapping from a Chinese fortune cookie, cracked open the cookie, and read the enclosed slip of paper with decided hesitation. I had been skeptical of fortune cookies ever since they had dissed me. Years back, I ordered takeout and was delighted to discover that my order came with two fortune cookies. Since I had recently split from my husband, I reveled in the fact that I didn’t have to share my fortune cookies with anyone. Feeling a burst of newfound independence, I indulged in both fortune cookies, one after the other. The first fortune said, “You appear to have it all together.” The next said, “Appearances can be deceiving.” My fortune cookies dissed me, and I have never quite had faith in them since.

So I didn’t think much of the fortune I came across years later that read, “You will take a year off to follow your dreams.” My girlfriends who were sharing the Szechwan pork read the fortune over my shoulder and laughed out loud with a resounding, “Hah!” If there had been a category for my high school yearbook labeled, “Least likely to take a year off,” I would surely have been granted the title. People like me don’t just abandon their responsibilities, leave their careers, and start meditating or making pilgrimages. People like me don’t change. Or so I thought…

I have always been a bit of an overachiever. When I was six years old, my school informed me that I was about to be tested for the “gifted” program. Previously, on test days, my mother had fed me strawberry Carnation Instant Breakfast, mixed with milk, to make me smart. I figured that if one was good, three packets mixed into my milk would make me extra smart. So I mixed my extra special breakfast, downed it, and promptly puked all over the woman administering my “gifted” test. They determined that I clearly wasn’t “gifted” yet and postponed my test until the following year.

The next year, I stuck to only one Carnation Instant Breakfast and earned the red “gifted” stamp on my report card. I continued asserting extra effort throughout grade school, and by the time I was sixteen, I started attending college classes during my summers off. After that, I pretty much never took off more than a week for the next twenty-two years. Between summers of pre-med organic chemistry and surgical internships, I didn’t have time for adventures like studying abroad or backpacking in Europe or joining the Peace Corps. I was too busy studying for medical board exams to learn how to play the guitar or take a year off to study at an art school in Italy.

By the time I finished my medical training at the age of thirty, I was too broke from school debt to take time off, search my soul, or travel, so I started my new job right away, just like all the other doctors I knew. Midnight deliveries and early morning surgeries filled my days and nights, and before I knew it, eight years passed by in a blink. Eight years of 72-hour shifts and early morning surgeries and middle-of-the-night deliveries. Not once during those eight years did I consider taking a year off to “find myself.” Yet, somehow, during this time, the spark of a dream began to grow in the infertile ground of my life as a doctor. Somehow, without even realizing it, I was becoming an artist.

It all began when I was a first year medical student, surrounded by neurophysiology and Gross Anatomy. I never intended to become an artist. After all, my brother is the one who went to art school. Me, I was the doctor from the time I was seven, nursing injured baby squirrels back to health. But as a freshman in medical school, I longed to move beyond dormitory life and decorate my walls with original paintings. I checked out galleries and shopped for art, but on a medical student’s budget, I couldn’t afford anything. I thought, "I could do that," and the rest is history.

I bought some watercolors from a kid’s toy store and painted poster board I bought from the drug store. I discovered that I felt profoundly alive when I was painting. Just dipping the cheap wet brush into the imitation cadmium red paint elicited ripples of childlike joy in me. Those early paintings represented something within me that was struggling for liberation. They were more than just paintings. They were a cry for help.

In the beginning, painting was just an occasional hobby, a dim little nightlight in the dark madness of medical education. But once I finished my residency, the spark found little pockets of oxygen on days off and weekends when I wasn’t on call. Then I met Albert, and the little flame of passion for art began to grow between pap smears and hysterectomies and C-sections.

Albert was the professional artist living in the house next door to me. Before meeting him, I never considered that being an artist might be a career, something that pays the mortgage and consumes your days. We started painting together, and within a year, I had my first solo show. The little spark that began in medical school grew into a raging bonfire within me, as my identity began to shift from doctor to artist. I painted during every stolen moment, between nights on call and days in the office. Gradually, I began to resent my life as a doctor. I didn’t like the direction medicine was headed in this country, and I resonated less and less with the title. In truth, medicine only got in my way. When I met strangers, I found myself saying “I’m an artist,” when they asked me what I did for a living. I started calling medicine my “day job.” By the time I submitted my thirty days notice at work, my identity had already shifted. I no longer felt like a doctor at all, and when I quit my job over a year ago, I honestly thought I’d never go back.

But something strange and wonderful happened during that time. I painted my dreams, hiked along ocean bluffs, wrote my stories and those of the patients who inspired me, meditated to the tunes of birds, and chased my daughter around the beach. Slowly, I began to breathe again, to be Lissa again, to start to feel after years of sleep-deprivation and blunted emotion and depleted energy. What awakened within me surprised me, since I barely recognized the person I was becoming, or rather, the person I had once been but was reclaiming. What I discovered is that I am still a doctor, but I am also an artist, a writer, a mother, a teacher, a wife, a chef, a chauffeur, a yoga practitioner, a daughter, a candle-maker, a hiker, a sister, a blogger, a housekeeper, a mentor, an Easter egg-decorator, a baker, a gardener, a seamstress, and a friend. I am more than what I do. I can be all of those things and still be the Lissaest of Lissas.

It took taking a year off for me to feel healthy enough to find that clarity, to reclaim my joy in my life and my work, and to discover the laser beam light focus of my passion that, when channeled appropriately, scatters like daylight to shine upon my world. Inspired by new friend Pat, I’m going to start it my Gap Year. Although, when I google-searched the term Gap Year, I realized that’s it’s widely used to describe taking a year off after college before embarking upon a career. So I think I’ll call it my Grown-Up Gap Year, the one I probably should have taken back in my twenties but never did. Maybe it’s more fitting to call it a midlife crisis, but that sounds so judging and negative, which doesn’t sound right for a year that was the best year I’ve ever had.

Whatever you want to call it, I now think back to that fortune cookie that told me I would take a year off to follow my dreams, and I have to laugh. No one in high school would have ever guessed that I would be the one to quit my job, retreat from the world, and find my bliss, but I have done it, and it gives me hope when I think of all of the despair, hopelessness, burnout, and exhaustion I see in the professional world out there. I wish I could single-handedly travel the globe and convince those who have quit living to step back and reclaim their lives. I have done it. I didn’t inherit money, I’m not supported by a working husband, and I don’t have a fairy godmother. I just took a leap of faith and listened to the intuitive words of my soul that was begging to be heard. You can too. It only takes faith.

The good news is that, by getting away from it all, I’ve refined my sense of what’s next, and I was delighted to discover that I love practicing medicine, after all. I just no longer resonate with the way traditional doctors are practicing medicine. It doesn’t feel like me anymore. So I’ve been studying and learning and practicing and growing. I am still a doctor, but not the one I was a year ago. I have been profoundly changed.

A week from today, I start my new job at Clear Center of Health, an integrative medicine practice in Mill Valley, where I’ll get to practice medicine my way, where I will have the opportunity to be the kind of doctor I have always been in my heart. In addition to being a doctor, I am also an artist, a writer, a mother, a teacher, a wife, a chef, a chauffeur, a yoga practitioner, a daughter, a candle-maker, a hiker, a sister, a blogger, a housekeeper, a mentor, an Easter egg-decorator, a baker, a gardener, a seamstress, and a friend. I am, once again, the Lissaest of Lissas, and I don't need to put myself in a box to know who I am.

I consider my year off time and money well spent. The seed I planted the day I quit my old job has slowly grown roots, sprouted, and, finally, blossomed. All I needed was a year of air and sun and water and time to flow with the wind.