I got to talking to one of my friends this week en route back from my brother’s birthday celebration about passions. I have long wondered when or if depression would rear its head at me – I finished IT this week, with all its roller-coaster effects, and realized some things about myself.
Part of how I hold depression at bay is through play and storytelling. The times when I get the most maudalin are the times when I can’t tell stories, or, worse, they rot in my head without me getting them out. There are a lot in there, great festering corpses of tales that have to be circumnavigated around in the still of the night or the glow of the morning, for fear that treading too near will leave their unmistakeable scent on a day.
Passions are funny things – they fuel us, they keep us going, in my case, they keep me ahead of real or percieved weights racing just behind me.
Ignore them, and they burn you up from within – follow them, and they make you feel alive.
It is when you acknowledge passions but do not act on them (for time or energy) that I am jousting with these days. Perhaps because of professional disatisfaction, perhaps because, seven (a powerful number) years after I figured I’d be dead, I have a load of freinds, and a great life, but I still haven’t amounted to much, and probably won’t outside of a very specific and small hemisphere.
I’m okay with that – I just need to keep the innerspace moving. If that stagnates, I’m screwed.