I've always experienced life as an observer, rather than a participant. I spent all of middle school watching everyone around me form new friend groups and dip their toes into the dating world. It was like watching a movie. I didn't really feel left out, or mind at all. I was curious, a captive audience. The story continued through high school. I never really had a "high school experience". I watched everyone around me have one, and I was fascinated and invested in their stories. But I never really had my own. I never really felt like I wanted to be a part of it, I just enjoyed watching everyone else's stories unfold.
I was always very passionate about my interests. I basically have two levels of interaction with any given entity: uninterested, or completely obsessed. There's never really been any middle ground. But I learned very quickly that most people not only didn't share my depth of passion, but they didn't understand it. They didn't understand how deep it ran, how all-consuming it was, how it was completely out of my control. I got a lot of well-meaning comments and a few more pointedly dismissive ones, and learned that it wasn't safe for me to fully express my passion, to anyone. So I stopped. I kept as much of it as I could bottled up inside, so as not to annoy everyone around me, or make them worry about me. I found outlets here and there, and when I ran out of people to talk to, I usually ended up in therapy, because that was a person who was literally being paid to provide a safe space for me to talk about my stuff. This continued well into adulthood. In the words of my favorite little philosopher, Linus Van Pelt from Peanuts, "there are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin." Each of my passions became my own personal Great Pumpkin - the thing that was so important to me that I couldn't talk to people about it.
One of my outlets was always writing. As a kid, I wrote little stories and poems, and even a song or two. In college, I wrote a lot of poetry. And then livejournal came along, and that became my writing outlet for everything, for about 10 years.
In 2009, one of my passions broke my heart. It was the first and only time I've ever truly had my heart broken, and I had NO ONE to talk to about it who fully understood how deeply it affected me. Not just my outward life, but every piece of the core of my being. The people closest to me tried to be supportive and helpful, but they still didn't fully understand. It broke me. I slipped into depression and, even scarier to me, apathy. I lost my passion, my connection to the world, my ability to feel. I lost all the things that made me ME. I lost myself. And I stopped writing.
It took a long time to start coming back. Three years later, in 2012, I found a new potential passion. I started to feel hopeful again, and was so relieved to know that I still had the capacity to feel deeply, buried somewhere deep inside me. It was pretty short-lived, but at least I knew it was possible. In 2015, I had the best year of my life to date, including a long-awaited event related to my first, deepest passion (the one that broke my heart 6 years earlier). I felt hopeful and positive and happy...ish. But I wasn't feeling any of it as deeply as I once had, and that was discouraging. And I still had no inspiration to write. None of it felt real, or permanent, like it once had. It used to be my rock, my solid ground to stand on amid the swirling sea of life around me. That no longer existed for me. I was still adrift, and all of these fleeting things were like pieces of driftwood that I would hold onto for a little break from treading water, until they sank or floated away.
Flash forward to January 2022. In the midst of year two of a global pandemic, when everything was chaotic and nothing felt solid, I had started watching a new-to-me tv show about a month and a half earlier, and I finally finished it. The last two episodes changed my life. I immediately rewatched the entire series in about two weeks (an unheard of binge level for me), and I was hooked. I felt myself opening up in ways I hadn't in over a decade. I started to reconnect with some core parts of myself that had been shut down for a long, long time. One of those parts was my passion. This felt solid and permanent in a way that nothing else had in all those years. I latched on immediately, and clung more tightly than I ever had before. I had found my rock again.
One of the biggest messages the show gave me was that if you feel passionate about something, if something or someone has an impact on your life, you have to express that. You have to tell them. It reignited the driving NEED I've always had for people to KNOW the impact they have on the world around them. This spark has moved me to shift from observer to participant. I've contacted a random stranger on the internet to tell them that something they wrote connected with me, and that it was wonderful, and meaningful, and important. I've taken opportunities to talk to people that I would have passed up out of fear, and out of imposter syndrome, and out of staying in my comfort zone in the role of observer. And every single one of these interactions has had such a positive ripple effect through my entire life, and my entire being, all the way to my core. I'm ME again. Maybe more me than I ever was. And...I'm writing again. I wrote a new poem a few days ago. My first new poem since college, nearly 20 years ago. I'm inspired to share my writings, old and new. That's why I started this blog.
The most important takeaway for me is this: if you feel passionate about something, you have to let it out into the world! If someone's work, or someone's art, or someone's existence has an impact on you, TELL THEM. Your voice matters. YOU matter. Do it, say it, BE it. Feel it. And let them feel it with you.
