On Relationships and Reflection

I feel like I've been conversing with a lot of friends about the topic of relationships lately. I've been in my own relationship for nearly 11 years at this point, so I tend to forget how tough things can be when you're still in the process of looking for your person. In particular, I forget how bad a relationship with the wrong person can make you start to feel about yourself.

I have an acquaintance I follow via what's left of my LiveJournal friends list and the situation she's in reminds me so much of how things were with Shawn. Shawn was probably one of the first men I felt really, truly passionately about in my life. He also turned out to be one of the most horrible, abusive human beings I've met to date. When I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that after my relationship with him, I wasn't ever the same open, giving, trusting person I used to be again, even after many years. That's probably for the best considering how many selfish individuals I tend to attract into my life, but still. It's hard not to regret the loss of a part of you that was innocent, and generous, and trusting.

Lots of people can make you feel self-conscious about your hobbies, your goals, or your personal habits. Shawn somehow made me feel self-conscious about who I was on a core level. He hated that I was introverted and thought quality was more important than quantity when it came to friends. He hated that I read and liked to learn. He hated that I wasn't more driven and success-oriented. He hated that I was still trying to figure out what I believed spiritually and socially even though I was only 21 or 22 at the time. He really hated that I was a sensitive person that felt things deeply. Being steeped in that environment for even one of my most impressionable years of my life changed me forever.

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.