It’s 4 a.m. Inspiration has finally struck.
Although the inconvenience level of lying awake in the middle of the night surely outweighs any positive attributes, I’m incredibly thankful. If my mental energy expulsion didn’t happen now, I’m nervous it would never happen.
As I grudgingly scribble into my note’s app with a dull, exhaustive headache and my leg working counterintuitively by anxiously running an early-morning marathon, I cannot help but notice that sometimes my writing feels forced.
It’s the start of the fourth week as I am writing this. I’m exhausted. Any still moment that arises, I feel as though I am wasting time. Relationships are a chore, and for every conversation I have, I look forward to it ending so I can “get something done.”
The addiction of impressing people with how hard I work has worn off. Writing-based compliments have become routine. The light has left my eyes as I tell people, “I love what I am doing.” Sometimes I wonder if I’m saying that to convince myself of it. I’m desperately hoping that used-to-be confident statement will not suddenly morph into a question.
All I do is anxiously bounce around from one place to another. I’m busy, which makes me feel needed and vital. Isn’t that what everyone wants? People tell me that I’m doing everything right, so why do I feel so unsatisfied?
A recent epiphany I’ve had is that we tend to lose ourselves in the lives that we create when we need to focus on the passions that drive us to perform those lives daily.
We, as entitled humans, feel the desire to be constantly fulfilled in everything we submit ourselves. The notion that every single day we will wake up and feel just as passionate and inspired is an expectational fallacy.
Working for the chase is a lifestyle that is extremely apparent in college students.
I am working for the chase this semester. I work nonstop to fill up resume credentials that don’t even slightly guarantee a future job prospect. I feel like I am going nowhere fast, but what happens if I cross the finish line after all this work?
Jon Krakauer, in his book “Into Thin Air,” in which he chronicles the climbing of Mount Everest, addresses this.
“Straddling the top of the world, one foot in China and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently down at the vastness of Tibet,” he wrote. “I understood on some dim, detached level that the sweep of earth beneath my feet was a spectacular sight. I’d been fantasizing about this moment, and the release of emotion that would accompany it, for many months. But now that I was finally here, actually standing on the summit of Mount Everest, I just couldn’t summon the energy to care.”
What happens if I can’t bring myself to care? I love to chase success and the “ideal” life or the sought-out job that I am working toward, but what happens when I finally arrive?
I wear the dress pants and busily carry my coffee around from meeting to meeting, just as my younger self dreamed of doing. I have found my niche gift and have the creative outlets to exercise it every day. I’m at the mountain’s peak, but my excitement is still on the ground.
Recently, I cannot shake the feeling that I am working hard for nothing. What if the only reason that I am working hard is that I’m addicted to chasing something that will never indeed come to fruition? Maybe I subconsciously love the journey, not the destination.
Here’s my advice. Do not lose yourself in the chase so much that you cannot find the internal passion for the things that you love. Becoming busier won’t make you love something more, just as it will not distract you from lost passion.
I equate work passions with relationships. You will never feel the same love and adoration that you feel for someone every day. It’s the act of choosing them every day. I don’t write because I am unconditionally in love with it; I write because I once fell in love with it.
So, I will continue to methodically say, “I love what I do,” until the green-eyed glimmer reappears, and I have found that it is not about chasing the linear destination but about refinding the start.
