Writing Lab: On Passion, Motivation, and Purpose

Prompt: "How do you find a new passion?"

Finding activities, pastimes, and even people that I'm actually what I'd call passionate about has never really been something that's come easily to me. This has especially been the case when it comes to anything long-term or potentially permanent. I was the type of kid that never really had a real answer for the adults in my life when they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I always had a hard time connecting with other people as well.

That said, I'm not so sure that I actively find passions so much as they find me. Most of the things I'm voraciously interested in I embraced in the first place because they made me feel calm and at peace, as opposed to because they lit some sort of fire inside of me. They were ways for me to form a buffer between myself and the rest of this world that made me feel so rejected early on in my life. The feelings of passion toward those beliefs and pursuits came later on after I'd developed the associated skills almost by accident thanks to repetition over the years.

On Faces

The interesting thing about faces is that they always tell you the truth of a given person, especially as that person ages. When a person smiles or laughs a lot, you can see it in the way their face has wrinkled, settled, or changed over the years. The same thing happens when a person does nothing but pout, and frown, and complain. The effect is most obvious in older people, but you can see it in young people as well.

I've known a lot of people that claim to be super positive, happy beings but aren't really that way in practice. If you didn't know any better from actually observing the realities of the person's life, you could look at the permanent pout burned into their face and see the truth. Same thing goes for people that may appear sour and depressive on the surface, but have faces that give away the fact that they actually laugh and smile a lot.

I'm realizing that I might be the second sort. Outwardly, I complain and bitch a lot. I would even say I see and describe myself as a brooding, pensive person for the most part. But when I step back and really admit how much I laugh and how often I smile -- how often I ultimately wind up seeing the best in something -- I realize that isn't actually accurate. And my face gives me away. I have the face of a happy, pleasant, inquisitive person even if I don't always feel like one.

Writing Lab: Changing, Evolving, Regrouping

Prompt: "Some people find it difficult to rebalance their lives after making a big shift. Do you welcome change or struggle with it?"

I don't think that anyone really likes change. My own personal feelings about it honestly depend on what kind of change we're talking about. Obviously, I don't like being forced out of a situation that was comfortable or beneficial for me, but if we're talking about a situation that had been stagnant or unpleasant for a long time, then I welcome change with open arms. I'm not one of those people that prefers the devil I know. If something sucks, I will always be willing to take a chance in the hopes that it could get better. 

I've even been that way when it comes to major life changes. For instance, I was slowly suffocating to death in my failed marriage years ago, so I was happy to reach a place where I felt like I could ask for a divorce, move out, and eventually start a relationship with someone new (not necessarily in that order, but that's a story for another day). Facing a change as monumental as divorce was super scary. It obviously would have been much easier to just stay where I was and continue with the person I was already with, but the possibility of one day being in a relationship that would be everything I wanted and needed it to be instead was motivation enough to see things through. I figured that even if things didn't go so well, I'd at least be able to say I tried instead of wondering "what if" and continuing to settle for a situation that made me unhappy.