'Follow your passions and you’ll never work a day in your life’ they said. It's generally good advice. But lately, that’s not how I have been feeling.
Reading and writing have always been “my things.” Now, I’ve had a lot of “things” over the years. For a while, dancing was my “thing”, but it stopped being my thing when I found out that my classmate, Jessica, also loved dancing. She was known as “the dancer” and even went to Croatia for it. I hated her. Well, I did hate her per se, but I hated how her dancing had been internationally validated. I couldn’t compete. So, I quit.
My next thing was modeling and pageants—until I quit. And then the next was piano until I quit again. My starting-and-quitting pattern showed me that there will always, always, always be someone better; someone who practices harder; someone with more talent etc.
All through the years, reading novels and writing in my journal were always there. I didn’t care that there were people who had read more than me—I just cared about what I was reading. I didn’t care that people my age and younger had books published already—I just cared about what I was writing. I was never known as a reader—I never talked about it. And I didn’t identify as a writer—the inner world I created with my journal was enough. Reading and writing for me, were literally furniture fixtures of my inner life. Reading was my private lamp light—it literally illuminated my mind with stories, lives and voices.
Writing felt natural. It was simply an extension of my inner voice, laid out on paper. Some days, I was a novelist, chronicling the details of my day as a plot. On other days, I was an architect: I would find magazine photos of houses that would be like mine and then write out all the details I would change. Occasionally, I was a music critic: writing about how clunky the piano sounded under the fingers of Rachmaninoff.
Reading and writing have become work. On the one hand, I am grateful that I get to use my mind and my hobbies as my primary work. And on the other hand, I feel that I can no longer read a story for its own sake. Reading and writing have now become operationalized. I am no longer reading and writing for the simple pleasure of it. And today, I don’t know how to get back to that place of pleasure and exploration.
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