Not that self-doubt is the sort of thing people talk about, especially not young rising stars whose careers rely on an image of invulnerability. Maybe some people don't feel it. But if you are human, and wake up with a hairdo like the Statue of Liberty, and have no connection to power or influence, and possess a realistic sense of your own importance in the universe, then you understand how truly distant the penthouse looks from the sidewalk below. You may even suspect that the penthouse is not worth having.

The American dream demands that we assimilate. The same dreams and the same roads to them get passed out to all of us, regardless of our histories and secret selves. This is not a plea for sympathy: The few of us who get the golden chances know how lucky we are. But in winning a scholarship, getting the perfect job, starring in a movie, taking first place in a big tournament, or even experiencing more common successes that distinguish one person from the next, we don't relinquish our connection to the people we were beforehand. If anything, a moment of success provides new clarity about how much the thing you thought you wanted really matters.

That's how it happened for me. As often happens in moments of indecision, a chance encounter made all the difference. I got the American Oxonian address list one spring morning in California and opened to the name of a Rhodes in Iowa who lists his occupation as "poet and farmer." Soon after, for no very articulate reason, my new husband and I moved back to his home state of Iowa. There had to be some common ground between Minot Woman and my new identity, and I needed to find it before I went further into the unknown. The possibility of waking up one day to discover that nothing of my previous self existed scared me more than jumping off the treadmill into the cornfields.

In the first weeks, I walked into the long grass behind my in-laws' house, stood eye to eye with a cow and sighed out the breath I'd held for months. It wasn't Minot, but it was a place where people would judge me by the way I treated people, admire my home-canned homegrown tomatoes and offer to spend their weekends scraping paint off my cupboards. In short, the real world: my world.

We've been here nearly two years. I've had several jobs, acquired a house and a Newfoundland dog, planted a garden, made friends with children and farmers and old people. Only from here, in this position of strength, can I walk sturdily away from the treadmill and think about the future free from the star-chamber effect of accumulated expectations. Academic air is too thin, it turns out: I need work that will give me real tools to touch people's lives and get my hands good and dirty.

I understand at last what my mother meant in those words she regrets. Kneeling in the dirt, planting tomatoes and sweet peas the way Grandma says to in her letters, I am making this otherworldly experience something that does happen to people like us. A woman -- a Minot Woman even -- can go to Oxford and return to the life she had before without severing the paths to either world.

In the end it wasn't the Rhodes that widened my horizons, but finding out that the Rhodes is not who I am. No moral, no lesson really, only the peaceful knowledge that ambition will not be my only compass. Failure doesn't loom as such a Technicolor horror when life's choices aren't mutually exclusive, and even the road not taken waits with wildflowers growing in the ditch.
salon.com | May 24, 1999

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