023: Chasing Passion
A photo I took near Champs-Élysées a few years ago.
Hi friends,
I had an unsettling, nearly out-of-body experience as I wrote the subject of this email (“Chasing Passion”). In college, I wrote in a blog called Chasing Pavements, which was ostensibly about travel and studying abroad but was also a not-at-all-subtle reference to Adele. As I typed “-ing Pa-” it was like I was suddenly back in my apartment from sophomore year, which I had painted savannah yellow and had a giant IKEA painting of a zebra on the wall.
It was around then (the year was 2009 or 2010) that I first found out that there were people who traveled! for! a living! And suddenly that was all I wanted. I was already well on my way to that lifestyle, looking back: I was studying International Relations, with a focus on US diplomatic relations with China. I had every intention of working for the State Department, though my most secret burning desire was actually to work for the CIA. (I had one meeting with someone from the CIA and it was so unsettling I immediately changed my tune.)
However, there was already a part of me, the same part of me that had rejected joining the Corps of Cadets, that was already pretty sure this was a bad career path for me. I have never accepted orders well, and any branch of government involves a lot of acceptance of orders, it seems.
It was in that apartment, ruminating in that blog, that I first wanted to write about my life. I discovered personal essays, which weren’t a new genre by any means but were gaining popularity. I was so enamored with the art of memoir, that it became the only thing I read for a long time, besides my assigned reading for school. I became obsessed especially with travel memoirs, and started chasing the possibility that I could write about my travels. I had grown up in very fortunate circumstances: My mother worked for an airline, and so we had traveled for basically free for a long time. We used it to see family, mostly, but we also used it for trips to Europe, the eastern Mediterranean (Turkey, Egypt, Crete, etc), and South America. I thought, I can write about those experiences.
It was the first time that I changed career directions because I was chasing a passion. I had actually always wanted to write, but since I had first voiced this at 12-years-old, every adult in my life had informed me that being a novelist was an impractical idea. So every career decision I made between 12- and 20-years-old had been about money, about where I could do the most good.
Travel writing seemed like the most practical version of writing.
Which, of course, is to ignore the unique challenges presented by travel writing and personal narrative. The expense, danger, and competition of travel writing, the necessity of cutting yourself open over and over to write personal narrative… I didn’t know, yet, what I was setting myself up for chasing that path. I would learn, eventually, and realize it, too, was a bad path for me. But, I remember sitting in that bedroom and feeling like something had finally clicked.
So the fact that I’m sitting here again, a decade later, essentially writing in a blog about chasing passion again feels like déjà vu. It could easily feel like failure. I haven’t “figured it out” yet. I’m not working a job I care about. Ten years on, I still have to think about this.
But it doesn’t feel like one. On the one hand, I think I have finally come around to the idea that it’s okay if things don’t work out the way we planned for them to happen. It’s okay to fail. I talked about this in a podcast once, how failure is often a good thing because it forces you to refine, to reckon with your desire, to persevere. I believe it even more now. On the other hand, people change! It isn’t failure to step back and reconsider. The failure is in not doing so. The failure is in continuing on, bull-headed, refusing to learn.
So, all that to say… For 18 months or so, I’ve been feeling sort of… lost. Nothing brings me joy or happiness except hanging out with my friends. At first, that wasn’t terrible, but then the pandemic descended and even that was whittled down to very little time. I began to live for the snatches of conversation, the Zoom calls, the socially-distanced hangouts. It was a strange change of pace for a shy introvert, I’ll tell ya.
This whole time, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do next. I no longer felt like I had a calling of any sort. I had interests, but nothing held my attention for long. I did a lot of thinking about goals, about who I want to become, but it wasn’t getting me anywhere. In the meantime, I’ve been working a Monday-Friday job that was slowly sucking the life out of me because I was living for the weekend, counting down the minutes until I had 48 precious hours away. I hate that. I promised myself a long time ago that I wouldn’t work a job that made me feel like I was only living for the weekend because I had watched my parents do that, had witnessed how miserable it made them.
In the past couple of weeks, it all started to click together. I kept thinking about Matthew McConaughey’s interview on Armchair Expert, when he talked about how red lights in life often turn into green lights. I kept reviewing the red lights I’ve experienced, trying to see where and when and how they turned into detours, green lights, and ways forward.
Then today, as I was procrastinating writing this by cleaning the house, I found this quote from Yrsa Daley-Ward on Instagram.
And I realized that all my goal-setting wasn’t working because I was focusing on the end, not the path. I was thinking so much about the destination, about where and who I’ll be once I’m successful that I forgot about the part that is most important: Enjoying the way there.
That was what made me want to be a travel writer once upon a time. The writing was secondary; it was the airports, the flights, the exploration, the new people, the getting lost that I wanted. Writing about it would have been fun, yes, but the daily adventure was what I was chasing.
Don’t worry, this hasn’t been a long-winded way to say I want to go back to travel writing.
I’m just saying, I guess, that I finally remembered to look for joy and passion, instead of money and success. Of course, I want those things too, but I’m remembering, finally, that the way to joyful work is in feeling joy while doing the work. It becomes a different search, from that perspective. Chasing joy in the process, instead of saving that for later, has become a way to refine what I want to do now in a different way than just finding a goal that meets my skillset.
And remembering, of course, that joy isn’t felt every day; no job is perfect; sometimes things just suck. That’s okay too. I’d just like for things to not suck every day. Which means there has to be joy in the process.
Things I Read and Loved Lately:
The Pandemic Is Breaking Women And Now We Have to Have Babies? Go To Hell by Lyz Lenz
What Is Prison Art, And Why Is It Important?, by Alex Greenberger
Martín Espeda on Framing the Present Through the Lens of the Past
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Valorie