On Friday as I was driving my husband, Damien, to work, the song “Guitar” by Cake came on my iPod. I’ve always liked the slow, rhythmic bitter-sweetness of the song, but I’ve never paid much attention to the lyrics before: “If I threw my guitar out the window, so far down, would I start to regret it, or would I smile and watch it slowly fall?” It always seemed borderline nonsensical to me—of course you shouldn’t throw your guitar out the window, John. It’s just a bit of silliness, I always thought. Just something strange to sing that matches the rhythm of the music.

I guess yesterday I was in just the right state of mind that I could listen to this song I’ve heard hundreds—who knows, maybe thousands—of times and suddenly be moved in a new way by the question posed by the very simple lyrics: if I gave up on my art, this thing I’ve been so devoted to for so long, would I miss it, or would it turn out that I’d actually be happier that way?

Those lyrics kept running through my head the rest of the day. They seemed to pinpoint a question I’d been carrying around deep inside for several months now, a question I didn’t even want to admit to myself I was seriously asking: what would happen if I just gave up on writing? What if I just decided, you know, I had a good run, got some good publications, even published a book. I’m done. “Would I,” as the lyrics wonder, “start to regret it, or would I smile” as everything I’ve worked so hard for falls away? Would giving up on being a writer be a sort of relief?

There’s that famous quote attributed to Lawrence Kasdan: “Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.” Of course, when you’re in a good groove, when you’re really feeling it, writing doesn’t feel like homework at all. It feels like magic, like being part of something much bigger and more important than yourself. And it doesn’t feel like work at all because the words, they just come to you. You don’t know from where. Later, when you read them, you don’t feel like you could have written them. They’re too good. All you did was transcribe what some magical being must have been whispering in your ear.

But on the days where it doesn’t just come to you, it certainly does feel like homework, and “having homework every night for the rest of your life” by choice feels a bit insane, does it not? You could relax and watch a movie, or you could play a video game, take a nap. You could do whatever you want to do, but you choose to write, even when it feels pointless, even when it seems unlikely that anyone will ever read it, even when you yourself can tell as you’re writing it how terrible this particular draft is. You do it anyway. That’s what makes you a true writer, not your publication history, not your awards, not whether or not you have any loyal readers or whether anyone besides yourself even gets what you’re trying to do. What makes you a writer is the fact that you write. Period.

But the other truth is that you weren’t born a writer; nobody was. You became a writer by choice. You imposed this on yourself. And knowing that can make the question posed by the Cake song an extremely serious one during the times where writing does feel like work.

Sometimes I think I would be happier if I wasn’t a writer. Wouldn’t it be nice, I ask myself now and then, if I could just focus entirely on the baby and not have to worry about how much writing I got done today?  But the truth is, I think it’s too late for that now. I’ve come too far, put too much work into it to just give up. My answer to the question is complicated, because I think I would do both: I probably would “smile and watch it slowly fall,” but at the same time, I think I would also “regret it.” Not having the self-imposed pressure would be a relief, but I would feel lost, I’m sure, broken, like I’m just drifting, and those feelings would overpower the pleasure I would feel at taking my life back.

Either way, it’s interesting to fully recognize that writing tortures me as much as it eases my way. It lessens the pain of living, while creating its own new kind of agony. It frees me from the boundaries put upon me by my life, my times, my society, my own sense of identity, while building its own prison walls around me. Flimsy walls, from which I could easily escape.

But I don’t.