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

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

whew. I look forward to seeing what people have to say to this.

I don't have too much of an answer; first of all, I'm not entirely sure I know where my passion lies. I know several things that I love to do -- read; dance; teach theater; feed people; work with people who are exploring faith -- but I can't really identify any one of them as My Passion. I feel pretty strongly about a number of things, but not absolutely overwhelmingly about any one of them. I guess that's why my "career" to date has such a patchwork look to it -- major in art, work for a year in books, work for a couple years in film, a year in theater, now grad school, etc. I'm also not especially good at solo work; I'm a great manager and given a lot of person-hours to shove around I can accomplish miracles with a team to direct, but left entirely to my own devices I tend to grind to a halt unless something happens to get me going again on a project. I dream big but don't necessarily accomplish a lot.

ooh, depressing! I mean, despite that self-knowledge, I actually feel like I'm living life to a fair degree of fullness. Not the max, for sure, but not the worst either.

The most important thing I've learned: if you want to do something, you have to just DO it, damn the torpedoes. If you love it that much, or think you might, you have to just quit your job/move to a new place/etc. You've got to be able to commit to the potential financial hardships, to maybe leaving your family and/or friends behind, to whatever else -- and I think the best way to do that is by ripping the bandaid off. You can plan to make your move for ten years, and *maybe* you'll do it then -- or maybe you'll find another reason why you can't do it yet. And meanwhile you'll be ten years older. I really think it's better, if you've found your goal, to just go for it, and deal with all the consequences as they come.

The second most important thing is that it's really not so bad to be lower-lower middle class. I would never want to be grindingly poor, especially not with children to support, but I make a tiny fraction of what most people with my level of education make, and by god, it's fine. I have a lovely apartment, I eat well, I go on occasional trips, I do the cultural things that are important to me. The easiest way to do all these things while having no money is to be willing to live in a neighborhood that is supposedly "bad" -- and you know, unless you're dealing drugs, you're not usually in a lot of danger in those neighborhoods. Could something happen? Sure. But it could in other parts of town, too. If you're willing to say "life's too short to be so afraid all the time," you can make a little cash go a long way.

I'm still making false starts, so I'll let that one go :) I will say, I don't *exactly* regret any of them. I learned something new from all of them. The only thing I really regret about them is that I tend to stick with them for too long. I also kind of wish I could get a do-over on the first, say, three years out of college. If I Had Known Then What I Know Now, I would've spent much more time and money traveling, putting it on my credit cards to worry about later. It might have been better to live at home for a couple of years and work in DC instead of moving straight to NY. On the other hand, I might *never* have moved to NY if I'd done that, so who knows. That's the trouble with second-guessing, anyway; the reason I didn't know then what I know now is that I hadn't done all the things that lead me now to know what I know. :)

I'm also still always making poor judgments, usually on day-to-day stuff. I tend to make really good choices when it comes to the huge, life-changing decisions, and then have trouble wringing the very best out of them every day. The three best decisions of my life, in order: to "convert" to Catholicism; to go to the college I fell in love with, even though it was more money than either of my other two top choices; and to quit my first job after a year, to leap into the (as it turned out) complete unknown. Those are BIG decisions, and they were all right. But almost every day of the last ten years I've failed to get the most out of them. It happens. You keep going, and wait for the moments of sunshine, you know?

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

This is kind of a more positive way of saying what the old folks are saying when they say, "Take what you want and pay for it."

I do think it's important to look at all your trade-offs as choices. I mean, you don't have to move out to the suburbs the minute you get a job, or wait until you have the money before you take a risk, or whatever -- they're choices, and they have both advantages and disadvantages like every other choice.

I expected to feel that I had fewer options as I got older, but I actually feel that I have more -- and part of that is being married (thus each of us cuts some of our risks in half), and part of it is actually having skills and experience, but part of it is just that I had a sort of tunnel vision in youth that I'm gradually losing.

(Though I think you're a better risk-taker than I am; doing some of the things you've done would have scared me to death.)