*** This entry was originally posted to LiveJournal September 18, 2008 ***
Over time I've invested a good deal of angst over not having any idea what my passions are. Well, more precisely, over not being able to ARTICULATE what my passions are. Every time I'd try to think about it, my rational brain would shut me down with some statement such as, "Well, you could never make a living at THAT." This, I now see, was just yet another manifestation of my "Not good enough" piece. No passion of mine, according to this piece, could be good enough or worthy unless it could be a career. What's up with that?
So, I've wound up frustrated (angry and sad) over the whole question of my passions, and I've let my frustration paralyze me not only for claiming my passions and acting on them, but also for even asking myself in a meaningful way what they even are.
Actually, I just had an "Aha" moment of insight--this is why it would do me good to journal or blog or some similar activity more often. I just remembered something Dad did when he was working for one of his plans to become fabulously wealthy (none of these ever worked, but that didn't seem to stop his pursuing the next one). I think this one was Amway. In any case, at the behest of his higher-up in the organization, he created a "Dream Board," which was basically a big collage of all the things Dad dreamed of so he'd know what he was working toward. I was young at the time, and at this point my recollection of it is all that really matters anyway, whether my recollection is accurate or not. My recollection is that everything on it was material, and that nothing on that board ever actually came to fruition. It seems that *I* took away the message that dreams, goals, and passions were A) tied to material gain, and B) pointless. I see now that I have other choices for how to interpret that memory, such as that dreams, goals, and passions do not have to have anything to do with material wealth, and that if I don't fulfill my own responsibility to do what it takes to pursue those passions, it isn't the passions' fault when they don't come to fruition. It's mine. I'm sad that Dad never seems to have learned that the key to his happiness didn't lie in the next sale, the next job, the next MLM plan, or the next woman. I think he could have enjoyed his life quite a bit more.
Anyway, I finally got sick of listening to myself bitch about this. I finally made the commitment to spend some time with myself on the question of my passions, AND to distinguish my passions from any notion of what I do, or might do, for a living.
I decided to start by thinking about the things that really get me charged up--the things that truly rankle me when they're maligned or offended, and the things that could send me on a three-hour conversational tangent. In retrospect that seems like a pretty obvious place to start, but remember that I'd long since lost conscious connection with what my passions are.
So this is some of what I came up with, in no particular hierarchy:
1. I am passionate about extricating humanity from its attachment to religion. There, I said it. I've posted before about my anger at religion--and especially (growing up where I have) at Christianity. I've had a sense that there's work for me to do around that anger, but I haven't known exactly what that work is or how to get to the source of the anger. I've decided now that maybe--just maybe--that's exactly what it is to be passionate about something. And I am passionate about this. I've gone on at length on this subject before, I could now, and I'm sure I will again. Maybe there really is work for me to do around this, and maybe once I get at that work the energy I carry around this will diminish. I don't know. My sense right now, though, is that making the commitment to make this stand and to go down this road may be the only way for me to find out whether there's work for me down that path and what that work might look like.
2. I am passionate about multi-culturalism, and in particular gay rights. I am a heterosexual, white, middle-class, American male. I am soaked through with privilege that I did not earn. I have some experience being part of a target group in that I am an atheist and I am a political liberal (no, that truly isn't a dirty word) who lives in Indiana. Apart from that, I'm up to my ears in unearned privilege. I am passionate about taking a look at that, and about learning how my words and actions impact those who carry less unearned privilege than I do AND how I can build community with people different from me. Maybe my particular charge about gay rights stems from the fact that I know more gay men and women than I know members of other target populations. Maybe it's connected with the religion piece, since homophobia so often carries the imprimatur of religion. Maybe it's a combination of those, or something else entirely.
3. I am passionate about personal work and growth--my own and others'. I learned once that if I get a piece of feedback from one person, it could be all about that person. If I get the same feedback from more than one person, though, it might be time for me to look at how it fits me. I've had several people tell me that I should be a therapist. I do have a passion around personal growth and emotional health. Whether my pursuit of that passion would look exactly like my becoming a therapist I don't know, but the passion for my own and others' personal work and growth is very real within me. One of the biggest places I do my own work is with The ManKind Project (http://www.mkp.org). Thanks primarily to a dishonorable journalist and the Internet, MKP has had a bit of an image problem lately. Well, I'm here to tell you that my own connection with MKP has been tremendously beneficial to my life. As a member of the international board of directors of MKP I'm already part of the solution to MKP's image problem. Now, by being less silent about it, I'm also going to stop being part of the problem. There's a whole lot more to my passion around personal work than MKP, but MKP lies at the core of this piece of my passion.
4. I am passionate about my relationships. I create lots of artificial boundaries that keep me disconnected from the people close to me, and those boundaries are exactly that--artificial constructs. My passion is for being closer, more connected, more present, more successful in my relationships with the people who are close to me and about whom I care.
That's a pretty good list for a start, I think. The next thing is to decide how I'm going to live these passions. It doesn't have to be--and at least in the short-term almost certainly won't be--connected to my livelihood or career, AND these passions will serve no one unless I serve these passions.
Stay tuned! :-)
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