Passion works for some people. I feel like passion is like some kind of trust fund, it’s the kind that will somehow never run out. It’s the high-paying stock, the portfolio, the bank interest that you can pay for your for the rest of your life. Passion for me was like the money I saved since high school, when the inflation rate wasn’t quite the reality. Passion was my favorite lamp with the faulty wiring. Sometimes it set things on fire. Other times, the light dimmed when I needed it the most.
So what do you do when your favorite lamp goes out, but you can’t bear to replace it?
You fix it. You work on it.
They never told me that passion should be worked on. More often than not, I see people burned by it. “It’s not my passion,” becomes the white flag of the new generation. When that was no longer a good enough excuse as bills piled higher on my desk, as pet food needed replenishing, I knew I had to work. I had to find something. It didn’t need to have something to do with my major, but it needed to pay the bills and at the very least I needed to see a point in it.
I wrote, I taught. I decided to continue teaching. It’s strange to me how something so literal and beautiful as the power of a story can be so alien to someone else. But maybe it’s in that simple, familial love that I find something to do. It’s beyond that of passion, it’s just the basics of passing on what I know to people who need (or ok, are required) to know it.
So I just enrolled in MA, I got swept into teaching at university level, and here’s hoping some sixty kids read and write a little better than they used to. It’s actually pretty terrifying, but you don’t really know how much you love something until it’s tested by the universe.
Bring it on, universe. Bring. It. On.