What they don't tell you about following your passion
Follow your passion and everything else will magically fall into place!Ever heard that before? I'm sure you have. Maybe you've even decided to follow your passion and realised, that while it's great that you are, everything doesn't just fall into place.Following your passion is like everything else in life - it takes work!Hard work!It takes time, persistence, patience, determination, setbacks, failures, frustrations. Just like anything else.I've been guilty of banging on about following my passion now and then. And at times, I've probably been a bit lax in explaining myself.What I can tell you, is that while I am now in a position to be doing what I love, it's taken a lot of work to get here.My initial decision to pursue writing as a career was back in 2012, and it's taken four years to find my feet in the copywriting field, and my fiction is still simmering along. But there's a long way to go.And although I absolutely love sitting in front of the computer all day long and writing, that doesn't mean every day is full of rainbows and butterflies. It doesn't mean I skip around in a blissful state of joy relishing every second of my life.Following your passion doesn't make the bad stuff, the annoying stuff or the mundane stuff disappear.I still have to deal with cranky kids, not enough hours in the day, family dramas, household chores and paying bills. I still have to do the mind-numbing accounting and filing that comes with running a business, and even just a household. I still have to battle insomnia and worries like will I fit into my jeans tomorrow, and are my kids really doing okay.But in the moments of the day where I am writing, yes that is bliss.Bliss that I am doing what I love. Something that completely fills my soul with a calmness that I can't explain. A sense of doing what I was meant to do on this earth. Yes, really.So, next time you hear someone talk about following their passion, just remember it's not the easy way out. It's not a get out of jail free card, and things don't just magically fall into place.But, it can make a small portion of your life just about near perfect!
Linking with Essentially Jess for the first time in 2016(because I forgot last week) for IBOT.