It has been said that you don’t choose your passions, but rather your passions choose you.
Picture this: The year is 2005. A 10-year-old-girl is crouched over the keyboard in her family’s computer room typing away. The wheels in her head are turning and 20-something pages later she is finally finished. She saves her work and presses print. As she watches the smooth, pressed papers glide out of the printer, her eyes gleam with excitement and pride. After the last page slide out of the printer and into her hands, she staples her masterpiece and rushes to show her parents.
Fast forward a couple of years to 2007, where this same girl is now 12 years old. She is sitting on her bedroom floor pressed up against the door so that no one can intrude as she is writing her third poem of the day. She’s in the zone and her thoughts are spilling onto the loose-leaf in her notebook so fast that she can barely keep up. After she crosses her last T and dots her last I, she scans the page with weary eyes and tucks it inside a notebook on her bookshelf, so that nobody can find it.
Now it is 2015 and that same little girl is now in college and she is me.
As a child I was eager to write and share my thoughts with others but somewhere along the way, I lost my confidence with it. Feelings of joy and pride were replaced by those of doubt and hesitation. Instead of sharing my work, I hid it.
“What if nobody likes what I have to say?”
“Will people make fun of me?”
“Do my thoughts matter?”
That is the thing about writing. It is very personal. It doesn’t matter what your topic entails because it is your thoughts put on paper. Your thoughts bleeding out onto the paper to be shared with the world. This is both terrifying and invigorating. Knowing that your words have the potential to evoke emotion in another is extremely intimidating. However, that one uplifting comment, that one positive response, makes it worth all the while.
Writing has always been a part of my life and it always will be. It’s been there for me regardless of who else was. If I’m sad and want nothing more than to crawl into bed and hide under my covers, you can bet that my notepad is right there next to me, open and ready to endure the passion within my words. If I’m happy and so consumed with life that I neglect my pen and paper, they are there at my desk sitting and awaiting my arrival; ready to welcome me with open arms.
This is a relationship that I have always cherished and don’t plan on abandoning anytime soon.
If I could go back in time and tell that 12-year-old girl one thing, it would be a simple quote by Allen Ginsberg, “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” Not everyone is going to agree with what I have to say, and I have learned that that is okay. To have a passion is to engage in that passion freely without any doubt. My passion chose me and from here on out, I promise to choose it back.
