passions in life

What are you passionate about?



I've given this question so much thought because it seems to be asked often and for some reason, it always makes me hesitate. What are my passions?

:: crickets ::

I honestly don't know why it takes me a minute [or five] to collect my thoughts. I know what my passions AREN'T. I know that while I can appreciate art and I think it's beautiful, I pretty much have no artistic talent whatsoever [which honestly pisses me off because quite a few people in my family can draw/paint and I feel bamboozled for this gene skipping me].

Dancing? No. Cooking? No. Singing? Absolutely not.

I won't lie when I say that years ago, this question used to make me panic. I used to sit and wrack my brain and think to myself "My GOD cathy, you have NO PASSIONS in life. You suck."

In my quest to finally really figure out what my passions in life are, and in true me form, I looked it up:

"a strong or extravagant fondness, enthusiasm, or desire for anything: a passion for music."

Thank you dictionary.com for putting this in the simplest of terms.

I have narrowed my [main] passions down to four things:

• Music - Not because I can sing or play 10 instruments or have 20000 songs on my ipod, but because it makes me feel like nothing else can. Music can calm me down, make me cry, give me energy, and make me smile from a memory attached to it. It is relate-able, it is influential, and is so vast that there is no way that you can't find a song somewhere that makes you feel something. It is truly universal.
  
• Writing - Very few people know that I have always written in some way every since I was a kid. I always had a diary or some notebook that could be found with entries or poems scattered throughout. I stopped writing for a long time and 5 years ago I started my first blog and I've had one ever since. I love to blog and I don't care if anything I wrote about seems silly, trivial, or too personal. I write it for me. To remember. To capture my thoughts that I am bound to forget. I still cannot get to the point where I can post a poem to my blog though. Maybe one day.
• Travel - Nothing excites me like travel does. Nothing gets my adrenaline going and makes me as happy as the thought of going somewhere new, even if that means some town in CT. I love seeing new things. I love walking down a street that I've never been to before, eating the best local food, observing people in a new town. I love leaving NY and I love the fact that I, city girl and all, am truly aware of the fact that the city is NOT everything and that there is a beautiful world beyond it. I caught the "get me outta here bug" at a very early age and it has yet to leave me. I doubt it ever will.
• Technology - I have shaped my life around technology. I went to a tech school to learn how to design tech and then I went to another tech school to learn how to write about it. I work in a software company. I read tech blogs more than news sites. It is one of the only topics in the world that I have never lost interest in, has never bored me, and the only topic that I could justify going to college for.
  

You might be reading this and shaking your head like "this girl is an idiot" but I'm a virgo and I over think things...

:: kanye shrug ::

Now that I have accepted/come to terms with/identified my passions, I realize how they all make sense and how they have all been in my life since I was a child. I grew up listening to music every single day and all the music I knew was not the norm in the sense that yes, I knew and loved Madonna, but what went through my ears was more on the terms of the Beatles, Frank, and typical Andes, folkloric music.

Writing like I said, I've been doing since I was a kid. It was really the only way I could release since I'm an only child and all of my family is in Chile, I never really had that person that was always RIGHT there to talk to. Likewise, my entire family living on another continent got me traveling at the tender age of 5.

And technology...well, that is a love that I "blame" on my grandfather, a man that is intrigued by the way anything works, and used to sit me on his lap so that we could take apart, and put back together, a clock. Just for shits and giggles.

I guess I am normal after all. Lol