Bob Greene is a classic case of a writer whose life is so absorbed with his material that he can no longer distinguish between the two. If he brought a camera to a picnic, even I would wonder.

As much as I care about striking the balance between life and art, I have more immediate anxieties about becoming a writer. I've always been driven by an urgent desire to press my feelings onto paper--to take them away from myself, understand them, and have others understand me. The paradox screamed through my consciousness when I re-read what I wrote about my first year. Sensitive, reflective writing--stuff that's real and human and not manufactured like a last-minute Crimson feature page--doesn't come from taking notes and making phone calls. It comes from within--less inspiration, more desperation.

But if I make writing a career, I'm making a contract with that pain. I will flee from it, but I also need to cultivate it, understand it, stay closely tuned to my feelings. I've always thought the happiest people are those who shut off what doesn't feel good. They build defense mechanisms--arrogance, dependence, whatever--to make themselves whole.

I don't think that's an option for me, though. I suffocate inside myself. My problem is not keeping people out; it's letting people in.

My dean this summer thought I was a reporter. He was wrong, though. Good reporters challenge stubborn bureaucracies. They weave through lies, exaggerations and insults to find the truth. Good reporters are arrogant, but they're also selfless in a way. I'm an editor of The Crimson and I spend 90 percent of my time there working with these reporters. But in the end, I'm too busy navigating through my own emotions to commit fully to the world of news.

The answer, it seems, would be just to stop the whole business. Shut my eyes and slump away from the writing thing--find another pasttime that's more gentle on the soul. But I am, like Tim O'Brien writes, "too frightened to be a coward."

I realized this summer that I can't shut my eyes to my writing. Fantasies about latching into the easy spirit of the American dream are slowly losing their lace in my imagination. I've tried therapy but, with Norman Mailer, "I wonder if their ends are essentially different, the artist a rebel concerned with Becoming, the analyst a regulator concerned with Being."

Writing and journalism, however flawed, are all I've got.

I hope my friends understand.