I Don’t Know What my Passion is and at This Point, I’m Too Afraid to Ask

Follow your passion. Do what you love. Love what you do! Find what gives you joy and let it kill you (or, in some cases, find what you love and be so bogged down by doing things that you don’t love so much that you forgot there are things you’ve done that you do love. Or something like that, so long as it fits on a Home Goods pillow).

One of the hardest things I’ve had to grapple with is the fact that I don’t know what my passion is. My life has been a process of elimination of all the things I don’t want to do — don’t want to be a doctor (in spite of the Greys Anatomy name) maybe don’t want to be a lawyer (however, would want to play one on TV) don’t want to be an astronaut. The last one is a lie that I’ve told myself because I know NASA would take one look at my astronomy grades and laugh me right out of Houston. This is advice I was told when I was deciding what major I wanted to be in college — I had to think about the subjects I enjoyed, what I wanted to learn. At 18-years old I made that decision and told myself never to look back. Now? I’m not so sure.

When it comes down to it, I believe that the scary part is that it seems like everyone else has got it figured out. Their plans have been solidified the day they walked across the stage at high school graduation. When I opened — when they did, they had their 20-year plan printed right in front of them. I can’t pretend to know who ‘they’ are. They prosper, they get promoted — they are celebrated on the pages of LinkedIn and through Twitter status. Some personal news — I have no idea what I’m doing. Some personnel news — I just quit my job.

It’s a good feeling to see someone you know succeed — that I can’t hide. It’s a big thing to celebrate, someone has found what they want to do and they’re running with it. They’re going to grad school, they’re moving to far away cities, picking up everything they’ve known and packing it away.

my passions:

• using gel pens to write in my planner
• going to workout classes where the music is loud enough to drown out my thoughts but not too loud that I can’t follow along with the instructions
• walking across the bridge that goes over the river and contemplate throwing my phone in it The Devil Wears Prada style
• cooking a meal with at least three cloves of garlic in it

At the end of the day, I don’t know the woman I want to be. When I talk to my mom, she talks about how she’s known since day one that she wanted to work in fashion. When I was younger, I wanted to be a ballerina who drove an ice cream truck. A professional soccer player. A lawyer — then I just wanted to play one on TV. A psychologist then a psychiatrist and then a therapist (first I had to figure out what each one of those did, then I threw out that whole thought all together). Contrary to major and public expectations, I never wanted to be an English teacher, I just wanted to wear a blazer with elbow patches.

Few things are ever linear, least of all our life paths, but it’s hard to look at someone else’s journey and not compare your own. Sometimes I think the thing to remember is that everyone else is still figuring it out, too. And no matter what choices I’ll make through my life, I’ll never resort to joining a pyramid scheme on Instagram.

and now, this

what i’m listening to:

• the boarders, sam fender
• love song, lana del rey
• what you like, wallows

on this day in history, 2014 (first year of college) my diary:

I have to get my priorities in order. I have to keep in mind that I am here to shape myself and my career so that I can prove to all of them that I am more than a pretty face, I have an eloquence about me that will take me to NY and beyond. There’s no way of knowing what is the next chapter, I just know that it is me at the helm and I am pressing the keys that form and imprint the words of my life.