You find yourself standing in a clearing. The world is quiet around you, save for the murmur of the wind through the crooked trees towering over you. It’s dark, but high above the gnarled branches you can see the clouds roiling, threatening to drop not just rain, but the whole weight of the sky.
That’s when you hear it. First a soft whisper, just the gentlest caress of the wind around your ankles. Then a flash of light above, dark silhouettes of twisted branches thrashing about, and an awesome roar of the skies. You clamp your hands over your ears and squeeze your eyes shut.
The sky tears itself open and pours out its wraths, its terrors, its horrors, its power. Drenched with rain, ears still ringing, you open your eyes.
You frightless thing, you open your eyes.
The wind whips your hair, your clothes. The immense light strikes the trees, then the ground, branding the world with its mark. The rain is icy, numbing your nose, your fingers, your toes.
A ridiculous smile spreads across your face. You throw your arms out and scream against the roar. You feel like you could end the world, and the world will end not with a bang or a whisper, but with that one long scream.
Then suddenly, it’s gone. The skies hush, the trees are still, the clouds wiped away as easily as fog on a window pane. The stars blink through the dark blanket of sky and the night is calm, like nothing happened. But you, standing there shivering in your drenched clothes, knew something happened. A storm came and went, but it still rages somewhere inside you.
When I found my passion, I was hit by a similar storm. I knew exactly who I was going to be: a writer. It was like getting hit by lighting, again and again and again. There was no end to what I wanted to do with this passion and there was nothing that would get in the way of me doing it.
Except, of course, the world.
Having a passion for writing or, heck, a passion for any sort of creative or liberal art, is difficult. It’s almost common knowledge that nowadays, science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields are “all the rage.” There’s this massive push for STEM fields due to “practicality” and “post graduate earnings,” and as a result, liberal arts majors suffer not only because they are constantly put down for following a passion that is “impractical” but also because that belief is supported by budget cuts and lack of funding for their creative or liberal arts education.
Because of the lack of support from the government and from the people around me, the storm that drives my passion wavers occasionally because of doubt. Writing and publishing a book is no easy feat—it takes time, money, and boat loads of effort—and people undermining the difficulty that goes into writing and publishing makes my chosen profession feel almost illegitimate.
In addition, I’m a college kid and being a college kid means that a lot of time is meant for classes. And if you’re not that good at being a student, like me, then following your passion is even more difficult when things that you don’t particularly care about, like general education classes and their 80 page reading assignments, get in the way. And yes, I’ve gotten the lecture about managing time wisely and whatnot, but the only real way for me to be able to work on a full length novel while being a full time student is to sacrifice chunks of study and homework time. Then there’s the question of whether or not I should try giving up on this passion altogether and picking up something more practical.
Every step I take towards being a writer is always met with some resistance from the world I live in. Every day, I am torn between fighting against the current of societal expectations and allowing the current to drag me down river like everyone else. Wanting to be a writer takes guts because there will always be someone telling us that it’s impractical, that we’ll end up without a job and without money one day.
Those words will always strike a nerve and we won’t always be able to shrug it off and continue on like nothing happened.
When your passion lives like a storm in your chest, words of discouragement can drain the force of the wind and power of the lightning. When I think about it, I know that being a writer is going to be difficult. It’s not going to get me a high salary like an engineer or a scientist and I know that some days it’s going to be difficult to make ends meet, but just because the world runs on money doesn’t mean that my life has to. I refuse to give up my passion for a decent, practical job. I refuse to have a future that is, as author Maggie Stiefvater said, “fine, only fine.”
Maybe I won’t get as much money as STEM majors. Maybe I’m straight up insane for wanting to fight against the current. Anyone who takes the risk and pursues an “impractical” passion is definitely insane, but since when is the pursuit of one’s passion “insane?” Who is to judge the practicality of one’s passion when it matters not the money that will come out of the passion, but the increase in the value of life that will come out of something made of pure devotion? Of love?
Maybe it’s not the person screaming in the middle of a storm that is insane, but rather the person that’s hiding away in a safety bunker. Sure, we know that one of the two will most likely survive, but only one of them will have truly lived.
