07 How can I find passion?

This letter was written as the conclusion to episode 07

Dear Daydreamer, 

There are two distinct times in my life where passion seemed to evade me. 

The first time I didn’t even know I was looking for passion, it just felt like something was amiss. I had accomplished everything I was told I was supposed to accomplish in order to have a fulfilling life: a steady job, a car, a home, a husband and yet I still felt empty. And by the time I knew I felt empty, maybe I felt even emptier because I no longer had the distraction of chasing the things I thought would fill it. 

I remember waking up each morning in a fog - so sad and so lost. If I’d done everything that could possibly do to make me feel happy and complete, and I don’t…so then what is left for me? Am I hopeless? I asked myself questions like this late into the night, circling myself until the cold blue light of morning peeked through the blinds. 

Now, some of you may remember this time of my life from my book, but I’ll tell an abbreviated version for those of you that may not have heard this already. This was the first time in my life that I had paused to question what I wanted for my own life. It was the first time it dawned on me that what I wanted might be different than what I was supposed to want. Growing up in an immigrant family, and in the generation that I did, it was frowned upon and considered selfish to think of your own desires and needs before that of others. I believe so much of this thinking stemmed from the necessity for collectivism in times of survival. And the generations before me were surviving wars and famine, surviving the many kinds of poverty that often come with immigration. But because my parents worked so hard to secure my survival, my generation was liberated to strive for happiness instead, only we had been taught just one path to it, and we had been taught to fear falling off the path, and the shame of it, too. Though because I was walking a path that was so obviously not mine, and I believed there to be only one path, I fell into a deep depression and struggled to make sense of how I was to live at all.

And then came the chocolate chip cookie. This story I’ve told so many times, but I want to tell it again because it’s exactly what Natasha and I discussed – it was a seed.

As I layed there each morning in a fog, in an effort to will myself to live another day, I would imagine eating a chocolate chip cookie. It was a tiny thing that gave me joy, like a point on the horizon to focus on. So I did so every day I could. And as days, months and years passed, eating a chocolate chip cookie turned into wondering which bakery had the best ones, which evolved into wondering if I could bake better ones, turning into an all-consuming obsession with baking, leading me to study pastry in Paris and eventually opening my own bakery.

Even after the bakery was running, I continued to follow each curiosity, water every seed, indulge in my daydreams, creating pathways so far, curving and spiraling in every which direction, that curiosities kept unfolding, and on and on they went.

I started a pastry tour in Paris, wanting a reason to visit the city often. I began traveling to far flung parts of the world to write about food which all stemmed from one small article I agreed to do for a tiny trade magazine about holiday baking. I included a couple anecdotes accompanying the recipes, which were the real project. And when editors of other publications read it, they liked it enough to suggest I write another article here or there, and I liked writing them enough to do it again and again, and this path eventually led to writing a memoir. 

Three were many more moments like this, but you see, along the way, following these tiny curiosities led me to discovering this thing called passion. 

The second time passion seemed to evade me was about 5 years ago. After I had sold my bakery, and my memoir had been published, I decided to take a break from traveling and writing and I had stopped the pastry tours altogether. From the outside it probably seemed like I was at the height of creating, the height of summer, but really, I was withering from exhaustion. Winter had started to set in and I needed to rest.

Now, I could have been passionate about wintertime, curious about my own hibernation. I could have allowed it and even supported it, but instead I resisted it with all the energy I had left. You see, being a “passionate person” had become a part of my identity. I thought showing how to live a passionate life was the value I had to give to others, not seeing that my worth was and is, me. 

So, once more, I found myself at crossroads where I chose not to follow my own path, again and again. I was desperate to keep following the one path that I thought others wanted me to take, as if I had an obligation to them, to be something for other people. And as I ignored my curiosity for slower, shorter days and longer nights, my passion was ignored too.

I found myself so lost again, having ignored what I truly needed and desired, so much so that I no longer knew what that even was. I searched out of fear that the passion would never return. 

I remember waking up in the mornings, aching for the passion I had once felt. I was consumed by an irritating feeling of being somehow disjointed, incomplete. I felt as if my legs were pointing the wrong way, awkward and unnatural. And there was also this distinct feeling of agonizing fire in me, a raw desire to do something, to create something, to make something happen, the longing to be connected to something, but because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, this fire was trapped inside, burning me day after day. 

So I pushed my tired body to produce something, anything, until my engine went completely dead and then there was silence…for years. It was silent for so long that I wondered if I had imagined a thing such as passion, if I had fabricated it in my head. 

And it was not until I finally stopped searching, I let go and eased into the dark wet earth, like a seed, and accepted that I could not control the seasons…it wasn’t until then that I became quiet enough for me to understand – that passions can be still too. 

That sometimes we don’t need to journey on meandering paths for our passions, but that passions are also hiding in the gratitude of where we already are. That maybe our passions are not a destination, or a bucket list, it isn’t what we do. But maybe passion is the way we look at and engage in our present reality, as it is. Maybe it’s how we live the small and big moments in our lives and everything in between. And so with that, all my paths, the ones I thought I “should” take or otherwise, melted away, and with it, the desperation for a path did too. And slowly, I was free to be curious again, to daydream once more.