Passion-less

I don’t have a passion.

In high school, I never enjoyed any classes in particular, never tried harder at one thing more than another.  I really only hated some classes more than others.  I did well in school because I knew how to bull shit.  A talent that came quite naturally to me.  But I didn’t know what I wanted to do.  I like to sing, but I knew that wasn’t going to get me anywhere in life, so I didn’t follow that.  When I started applying for college, I went with the one thing I wanted to learn more about.

As a sophomore in high school, a friend of mine started cutting.  Another became really depressed.  I tried to help them through it and I became interested in the psychology behind their issues.  There was one psychology course at my high school.  It was only offered to seniors, and was very competitive.  For some reason, it seemed that only the popular kids in school got into that class… weird, right?  Anyway, I didn’t get to take it.  I took an independent study on self-mutilation with the school guidance counselor.  It was interesting and educational, but I didn’t learn much more than I already knew.  So, when I applied to colleges, I decided to be a psych major to foster my great love of helping people.

Then I took Psych101… and I changed majors.  I wanted to learn about dreams and emotions and people and love and relationships.  I learned—with some resistance—about experiments and statistics and the scientific method.  I think we had one class on dreams.  I got a C+

After three years working at a summer camp and a year working at an afterschool program, the next logical step was to become a teacher.  So I tried switching my major to elementary education, but my school wouldn’t let me until my sophomore year.  Good thing too.  I ended up talking to an education major advisor, and she helped me figure out what I really wanted to do (or thought I did at the time).  I remember telling her “I like writing essays.  No one likes writing essays.  I want to teach other kids to like writing essays.”  She talked me into becoming an English Ed major.

Once again, the school’s policies kinda ruined my plan.  The English education program requires one to have a concentration in literature.  But I wanted to write, to teach kids to write.  I asked the chair if there was any way I could do a double concentration or something, but she said it would be too hard, and to just take a bunch of writing classes and put on my resume that I had a “focus” in writing.

After taking two semesters in a row with three literature classes in each—let’s do some math for a second: that’s like 300 pages per week per class, times three classes a semester is about 900 pages a week, on top of two other classes, tests, homework and essays—I realized that I didn’t want to read the books I was learning about, never mind teach them to kids!  So, I told my parents I was going to drop my education degree and become a writing major.

My mother didn’t like that idea.

We argued for a while, and I ended up writing an eight (8) page essay for my MOTHER.  Not for school.  Not for a grade.  For my mother to read and understand.  I dropped my education degree and changed my concentration to writing.  And fell in love.

I found people who understood me.  People who liked writing essays.  Who liked peer editing.  People who BSed their way through high school because they could write a good paper on a book they had only skimmed.  I wrote fiction, journalism articles, poems, memoirs and sometimes just random things that popped into my head.  And people liked it.  They told me I was good.  They listened to my ideas on their work and gave me suggestions to improve mine and it was wonderful.

That lasted for about a year and a half.

And then I graduated.

It’s been about a month since I graduated.  And I have written one article for the alumni magazine.  Other than that, this is the first time I’m writing anything.

I have no one pushing me.  No one grading me or giving me assignments or telling me to submit my work to journals.

I’ve been wanting to create a blog for a while now.  I’ve thought about it, talked about it, even looked into different sites a few times.  But I have nothing to write about.  I don’t like make-up or fashion or cooking.  I don’t have anything worth-while to write about, and probably nothing anyone would bother reading.  I don’t know what will come of this.  I’ll probably write about my life.  My post-graduate struggle as a 20-something struggling “writer” (as I claim to be).

I guess writing is my passion.  But what do I write about?