Tell me about yourself.

[resonant]

I'm suddenly struck with the desire to know how other people do the things that matter most to them, how they find and follow their passions.

How do you decide where your heart is? How do you carve out time and energy to pursue it?

Are you on a new road or one you've been following for a long time? What have you learned that could help others? What false starts have you made, what poor judgments? What have you compromised, and what do those compromises look like to you now?

Comments

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

the idea that you've already said "no" to yourself if you decide not to ask. I'm much hampered by fear of rejection, and need to take that to heart.

I was always very shy, and that's something my dad would always tell me as he prodded me to "go ask already!"

Thinking on that, a corollary: something useful to me has been doing things that I wasn't initially comfortable doing, in order to stretch my comfort zone. I was always shy, and hated dealing with strangers, so the dog training was good in that it put me in contact with lots of strangers, and in fact I had to stand in front of a roomful of strangers and their barking dogs and actually have them all look at me as I demonstrated something. Now, talking in front of groups of strangers is no big deal. Mind, I still don't enjoy it, but I can do it.

Getting to the point of being able to do it was something I learned through dog training: you pair something you really, really like with something you don't enjoy--in such a way that, in order to get to the good stuff, you have to plow through the unpleasant stuff. For me, that meant getting to work with dogs was a reward for public speaking. Every time I talked to a stranger, I got to pet their doggie. I found out that "hey, this isn't so bad. I can do this!"

For you, I imagine, writing (and posting fanfic has been a way to stretch your comfort zone over your fear of rejection. Has it?

It might be fun to see if you can get a job(2) that will use a second set of your skills and that will stretch you a little bit. Make it challenging for yourself! I bet you can do lots of things really well.