Writing Lab: Do What You Love and Love What You Do

Prompt: "Is your career your passion? Are you in love with your job or your field of work?"

I think that I'm somewhere in between on this one, as I have mixed feelings about working as a freelance copywriter and ghostwriter. On the one hand, I would definitely say that writing, information, and language are things that I'm absolutely in love with and have been since I was a little girl. I also feel comfortable saying that if God really did have something specific in mind as far as what he wanted me to do with my life when he made me, it probably has a lot to do with being a writer. I have always been a writer in one capacity or another and I know that I will continue to be a writer until the day I die. It's too big a part of who I am for me to do anything else.

On the other hand though, I'm not a very service-oriented person. I have some great clients and I'm incredibly grateful to be able to earn my entire living working for myself out of my home, but I can't honestly say that I'm passionate about the type of writing people are actually willing to pay me to do. A good 90% of it is incredibly dry and boring -- mostly informative content meant for company blogs, brochures, and so forth. I'm very good at what I do, so I make decent money and have no problem finding steady work, but I don't really take a lot of personal joy in the actual work itself. 

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.