My younger brother lives the life that I was supposed to live. At least in our mom's eyes, anyway. I was the one who was supposed to get the PhD in some scientific or engineering field from a top-rated university. I was the one who was supposed to get the highly specialized job and have a career doing things that would change the world. I was the one who was supposed to find the equally brilliant wife and give Mom brilliant grandchildren.

I have done none of those things. Good thing my brother was there to take care of them all for me. And just in these past couple of weeks, he's been named Director of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He develops very tiny bits of technology, most of which are used to make solar panels work better.

Lest you think I'm expressing jealousy, I'm not. This is a good thing, and I'm proud of my brother. He deserves it. I'm not jealous of his life because I deliberately chose not to try for one like it myself. I could have. I was in the upper ranks of my Engineering class at Vanderbilt. I even had an offer from one of my professors to work in his lab for one summer, a job that would have given me valuable experience and connections. But instead, that was the summer I went to Ottawa and worked on the set of You Can't Do That On Television. It was my fork-in-the-road moment. I made my choice, and I've never regretted it.

That said, I do feel a touch of sadness in times like this, that my life hasn't met expectations, somehow. Whose expectations, you ask? I was in therapy long enough to know that the expectations are my own, that they belong to the gremlins we all have in our heads that tell us we're not good enough. The gremlins react to someone else's recognition by the world, and tell us that we should get that kind of recognition, too. But we can't control how the world sees us. We can only control our own decisions.

I think the hiking I do symbolizes the way I've come to approach life in general. Each mountain I ascend is its own challenge, and when I reach the summit, there are few, if any, people around to see it. But that doesn't matter. Meeting the challenge is what counts, and once I've met one, it makes me eager for the next. And yeah, I'll admit that I wouldn't mind having those accomplishments recognized every once in a while, but I'm not going to stop striving for them if they're not.

My brother has his mountains, and I have mine. He's just reached one of his summits. My next one is out there waiting for me. Time to go climb it.