My passion.
I suppose I started thinking about my passions senior year of high school when I was filling out the hundreds of scholarship and college applications, trying to put all of myself in the 500 word maximum limit. Many times I would just bs something I was mildly interested in that pertained to the specific scholarship, because I’m the kind of person that’s somewhat good at a lot of things, but not really good at anything. (Sidenote: I know you don’t necessarily have to be good at something to have a passion for it, but the way I see it, if you have a passion for something you’re gonna do it a lot and are at least above average at it.)
For instance, I really like music and can play the guitar, bass, ukulele, and a little piano, and can carry a tune, but I don’t live and die for music. Sometimes I go weeks without picking up my guitar or uke, and I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I plugged in my bass.
This not having a passion thing bothered me for a while. I thought I was missing out on life because I just wanted to be really good at something; I wanted to wake up and want to do one thing and one thing only, but I didn’t know what that one thing would be.
Sometime during the whole figuring college thing, where to go to and what I wanted to do with my life, someone gave me the advice: Find a career doing something that you’d do for free. That’s when it started to click for me that I do have a passion.
As long as I can remember I’ve loved learning. My favorite shows growing up were The Magic Schoolbus, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and the Discovery Channel. In short, I’m a nerd and have always been a nerd. I just really like knowledge of all kinds and truly believe the cliche “knowledge is power”. I’ll read any book you put in my face and want to take almost every single class my university offers.
But, as Aunt May said, “Great power comes with great responsibility”, so my passion is also learning how to use the power of knowledge and show others how to use it as well. I think that’s one of the reasons I love writing so much, because words are so powerful themselves and can hold and spread so much information. I want to help change the conceptions of language, and show people how to fully benefit from words.
I love that everything I write, whether a 140-character tweet, a seven page paper about the Old English motifs found in some of the Arthurian literature, or even a blog post, has never been written just like that before. My words are My Words. No one has ever, or will ever, use them exactly as I do. If that’s not power, I don’t know what is.
Where this will take me, I know not. But I’m excited to find out.
