If you were asked to describe yourself to someone who knew nothing about you, what words would you use? Many of us would use hobbies and activities we actively participate in to describe ourselves: student, athlete, musician, artist, writer. Of course, these categories show outside spectators a lot: what we value the most of who we are. The problem with this classification of ourselves is that it sometimes limits us.
The reality is that we will never be always successful at the activity we define ourselves by. As a student, there will always be exams and papers I bomb. As a writer, there will always be articles or short stories that I put a substantial amount of time into that don't happen to be that good. As a student-athlete on the cross country and track team at Emory, there will always be bad races, sometimes horrendously bad races. As a person, there will be times I compromise my moral values to conform with my friends.
Of course, it's important to learn from mistakes that lead to our failures. After seeing a bad grade on an exam, you can change how you prepare for a test the next time or adapt to a professor's teaching style. Take more organized. Go to office hours. Look at particular sections in the book the professor focuses on. If we have control over how well we perform, it's regretful to not do everything we can to improve and meet or even exceed our expectations.
But sometimes, failures are beyond our control. We may just have a really bad day sometimes. When this happens, we are compromised, especially if we take exceptional pride in what we do, and suddenly we're not performing well in it anymore, or we don't enjoy it anymore. What do we do then?
A personal example is my experience as a track and field and cross country student-athlete in my junior and senior years of high school. During this time, I defined myself and other people knew me by one, and only one, word: a runner. I did everything I could in my control and pushed myself extremely hard, day in and day out to see great improvements. Before, I loved being a runner on the team. I loved the feeling of finishing a 13-mile long run, kicking it into the school parking lot at 6:20 mile pace with every single team member in the group feeling as if their legs were about to give out. I loved finishing a dual meet in a 10 person pack and sweeping the other team, winning the one to five spots in the meet. I loved wasting an hour of my time in the weight room with my team, who I considered my second family and best friends, after a hard 400 workout.
It's important to note that I wasn't a gifted or talented athlete: I excelled by being a much harder worker than my competitors. It was a formula that worked for me in improving every season, and my expectations arose as a result. But after the cross country season of my junior year, that formula suddenly didn't work as much in track. In that winter season, I wouldn't run a single personal record. In some races, I didn't even come close.
It would have been easier to just play off the lack of success on just one season, but my under-performing continued for another year at least. My workouts would be exceptional and I was doing everything else right, but I would never compete up to my fitness level even in the next cross country season. In the county championship meet of my senior year, my team nearly upset a heavily favored heavyweight in our county to win the title. We lost in the closest way possible: in a tie that led to us losing on the sixth man. Many of my teammates ran the cross country races of their lives, but again, I had under-performed that race. Although a large variety of factors led to the disappointment, I thought one of the big factors was me not running to my fitness level. I had let myself, my coach, and worst of all, my team down.
Failure in one race could be attributed to just one bad day or a minor adjustment. I'd felt like I wasted a lot of prime opportunities to improve when there were others who wished they could be as healthy as I was with health and injury. Ultimately, I felt distraught because how poorly I was running made me stop enjoying it. Going to practice felt like a chore and stopped being as fun as I remembered it. I stopped defining myself as a runner when asked. At that point, I didn't know who I was. Although I kept going through the motions, I was very disengaged from the very thing I had defined myself by the past three years. There was no way I was going to run in college.
Consequently, I tried other things to distract myself from not running well. I started writing a lot more for my school newspaper. When I wrote features about another student-athlete, I felt completely absorbed into doing the best I possibly could to do justice to and represent that athlete in the best way possible. I started rekindling friendships with old friends with whom I had grown slightly distant from after joining cross country. By extension, I'd meet and become friends with other people who I had much in common with. I found another group of people to socially define myself by.
And then something in my running clicked. That winter season, I ran personal records and broke formerly impenetrable barriers in my two primary events: the 3200m and the 1600m. It was surprising to me that I was actually running well, as I had discounted myself as a runner just one season prior. In addition, I started to understand that, sometimes, running as hard as you could every day was actually not a smart way to train, and rest and easy days were as equally as important. It was ironic since I stopped thinking about running as much: the day of a race my sophomore year, I would be anxious about it the two days before. Now, a race isn't on my mind until I'm on the line.
Ironically, disengaging from my passion allowed me to come back and discover what I loved about the sport in the first place, while still extending myself as a person. After my better races in winter track, I decided to try and run in college. That's not to say I don't have bad days running anymore: I still have terribly horrendous races, but they don't devastate me as much as in the past and I'm mentally able to learn from and move past failure much faster. Running is still one of the most important activities in my life, but it's not the only thing that defines me anymore.
When your passion becomes absolutely overwhelming and gets stripped of the elements that made you fall in love with it in the first place, my advice is to partially disengage in it. You don't need to stop, but explore a broad range of unfamiliar horizons to learn more about yourself that you didn't know before. By falling in love with other hobbies and activities, you can apply the same fresh approach to the passion you defined yourself by in your past and learn to love it yet again, perhaps in a different way. By doing so, you gain perspective to make yourself a more better and more complete person, and you realize you are more than your one passion.
