Finding Your Passion
RETOUCH BY DAVID FINCH
T
he tricky thing about being married to a
life coach is that you’re constantly faced
with the burden of having to follow your
passion. Some days I don’t want to feel accountable to my aspirations. Some days I just want to
feel put-upon.
difficult to strike this sort of balance. My brain
doesn’t love to be half-in; I tend to favor an
all-or-nothing approach, and it burns me every
time.
A few years ago, feeling trapped in a passionless career, I left work in the middle of the day
to drive around aimlessly until it was time to
go home. It was the middle of summer, and I
couldn’t handle sitting indoors at a gray cubicle
on such a glorious day. The meandering drive
led me straight to my house, an hour away
from the office, so I parked
my car in the garage,
grabbed a copy of
Rolling Stone from
my briefcase, and
headed out to my
uilt
b
s
patio to read.
ve
It’s kind of hard to ignore this new populism
insistent upon monetizing not only our time,
our thoughts, and our efforts, but also
our passions. “You can live the
life you’re dreaming of,”
Kristen reminds me
whenever I’m
grumpy about
s
e li
having to go to
n
v
i
o
l
i
s
n
s
a
The feature article
work. “You just
pa
ng
We c
r
i
d
u
l
o
i
profiled the band
need to follow
d
u
b
n
s
i
u
,
k
o
n
Rush, chroniyour passion.”
.
ar
t
I thi
s
t
r
a
a
cling the career
p
Her advice is
to l
ard
s
h
e
e
of one of my
v
h
bang-on. She just
t
e li
s
o
h
favorite bands.
t
happens to offer it
It
seemed
they’d
started out
up on the days when
like most bands, in modest arrangements
I don’t want to hear
with humble gigs, their cars packed with equipit. What can I say? For
ment as they drove from city to city. In time, the
those of us who prefer
band would release numerous hit albums and
pity and consolation, the very idea of someone
develop an enormous following. When record
championing our better interests feels like a slap
labels urged them to sound more commercial,
in the face.
they stood their ground and remained faithful
What really burns me up, though, is that I know
to their collective musical vision. (You always
she’s right. We can live lives built around our
know a Rush song when you hear it.) With a
passions; the hard part, I think, is building those
musical career that has spanned decades, they
lives to last. Indeed, one of the great challenges
have earned a fortune. And, best of all, their
of building a rich, meaningful life is knowing
time is completely their own. None of the three
how to balance passion with responsibility.
men in this band had a boss to answer to; they
Owing perhaps to my Asperger’s, I often find it
were free to simply create and perform and ex-
36
ZOOM Autism through Many Lenses
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;
plore ideas. To me, that was the very definition
of a rich and meaningful life — a life I desired
more than anything.
A few months later I found myself enrolled
in a creative writing program, determined to
become the literary darling of my generation.
(How’s that for all-or-nothing?) Sure, I hadn’t
ever studied writing, and except for the occasional article about Rush, I didn’t read at all and
really had no concept of what books entailed.
Plus, I still had a full-time job and a wife and
two children depending on me for income and
health insurance. But, you know, whatever — I
could make it work.
After publishing my first essay and stumbling
into a generous book contract, I decided it was
to time leave the engineering world and its
gray cubicles to do the thing Kristen has always
wanted me to do: pursue my passion. What she
didn’t specify, however, was that one needn’t
pursue one’s passion at all costs.
An interesting thing happens to your creative
energy when you decide, out of the blue, to
stake an entire career on something you enjoy.
Suddenly, that thing you cherish can become
damned by expectations. This article better be a
hit, we tell ourselves. This painting better make me
a fortune. This cupcake store better start turning
a profit. As soon as we relinquish a little bit of
power to those thoughts, our articles don’t get
written, our paintings don’t sell, and people
everywhere agree to start hating cupcakes.
When our relationship with creativity becomes
an adversarial one, creativity forsakes us every
time — and for good reason. I no longer enjoyed
writing, and worse, I felt I had nothing left to
say because I wanted to say it for $4 per word.
People might pay a chef for his food, or an artist
for his illustrations, but no one wants to pay a
writer. That’s just how it goes. Leaving my job
to write full-time had been a mistake, it seemed
— despite the successful book, despite the
articles and national speaking tours, despite the
television offers from HBO, DreamWorks, Fox,
and Warner Brothers.
Today, with all that behind me, and happily on
a deadline, I see now that my pursuit of a passion-filled life hadn’t been a mistake. I’d simply
neglected to find the right balance that woul