Our passions are what drive us.

The things we love ranging from a person, a hobby, or a job is often what makes people get up in the morning and go about their day. Some even go as far as to make it part of their identity.

But what happens when one day you wake up and all of the criticism you've been getting or the stress from the environment you're in has changed you and you no longer love what you used to?

I have dealt with this first hand and it made me question who I was and everything I had always wanted. I was a part of a career-building high school program that was focused around culinary and hospitality. Ever since I was little I had wanted to be a chef. I found it so interesting that a person could take individual ingredients and fuse them together to create something completely new. So when I got into this high school program I was elated.

But over the four years, I went through personal growth and change and by the end of my four years there, my passion for the culinary arts had faded immensely.

There are many reasons for why this may have happened, but the ones that I was able to recognize led me to this conclusion: depending on the environment that you are in, your passion can turn into something that makes you anxious and unhappy.

This is not to say that the hard work that needs to be put into pursuing your passion is what makes you unhappy, but instead, it is the way in which your passion is being nurtured by the people that are supposed to be helping you grow for the better. This is also not to say that you should let other people affect your life in such a significant way because your passions are validated no matter what others opinions may be.

The decision to change what you love because it no longer makes you happy needs to come from you and you alone.

It should not be based on one bad experience, but a culmination of negative factors that led to a change in heart. It should be after a long and hard thought process of why you are making the decision that you are. If your life experience has affected you in such a way then it may not even be a decision, but just a feeling.

I have often heard stories from friends about them loving a sport they played as a child, but after a few years of being on their high school sports team, they started to hate it due to having a coach that was not supportive or encouraging. Then in college, they stopped pursuing it because they grew to hate it.

Losing what you love because of an environment that has taught you to hate it is upsetting. But people should learn to differentiate between a bad experience that has tainted something they once loved and a genuine disinterest and dislike for a passion they once had due to a realization that it made them unhappy.

If it happens to be the latter, don't lose yourself.

Growth and change of interest are normal and you will, once again, find the thing that drives you.