Fearless Friday - Passion

I may be an erotic writer, but in today's blog 'passion' is not about the erotic.

Passion is a strong and barely controllable emotion. Most often it is used in a romantic/sexual sense, but today, I'm using it for a more general life purpose term.

Have you had those questions thrown at you? The ones something like:

• What are you passionate about?
• What's your passion in life?
• What makes you get up in the mornings?

I've had those thrown at me over the last year or more...and they've kind of had me stumped.

I like lots and lots of things. I love some things too. But passion left me kind of lost.

Then yesterday, I read an interview that had my body tingling, my mind firing on a thousand different ideas, my heart racing, and everything in me jumping up and down. It was an interview by Mark McGuiness of Vicki Saunders, which you can find here.

I did a Creativity/Productivity course online with Mark McGuiness, and his emails keep coming to my inbox. If I'm busy, I don't get a chance to read them, but yesterday I read this one (and I'm not sure why - fate poked me, I guess).

Vicki Saunders spoke to and for me. I felt every word she said. I vibrated with energy as I read what she said, had experienced, and I was incredibly inspired by what she had created SheEO.

My passion awakened as I read. My mind engaged. My body was excited. These were signs of passion. I knew it right away.

And then a strange thing happened. A tiny bit of practical advice from a friend shut me down. It was as if a light turned off and everything went dark. I gave it no thought. I went to work.

This morning, as I wrote about yesterday, I had almost finished when I remembered the interview. I wrote how I'd felt reading it. I got those bubbles again. Then I wrote about the advice. And I realised how disproportionate my reaction was to a practical response. My friend didn't laugh at me. There was no scoffing. No abuse, or discouragement. In fact, my friend acknowledged the idea I presented, and encouraged me to keep thinking.

Yet, I didn't.

Why?

I'm scared of passion.

I've always been a firey, passionate person. I'd have an idea and I'd run with it. I'd push shit uphill if I thought it had a worthwhile purpose. I'm not afraid of hardwork, so long as it has purpose and I'm passionate about it.

So often through life people laughed or scoffed at my ideas. Usually it didn't bother me. Often I didn't listen and went ahead anyway. Sometimes I listened and stopped. Other times I gave my ideas away to see them used by others later. And these were fine.

But... I can pinpoint the event where my passion died. Where the fire inside me was extinguished. Where everything I was passionate about, everything I'd worked for, everything that made me who I was, was snuffed.

It's a time in my life that almost killed me. I think if I wasn't such a tenacious, pig-headed, stubborn person, I wouldn't have made it through.

Since then I've steered well clear of passion. I've made myself into a cautious, controlled, contained, shut off person. Nothing I do is all-consuming because there is no way in god's earth I will go through the completely gut-wrenching, demoralising, soul destroying, horror of having my passion torn away from me.

And that's not right.

That's not who I am.

That's not who I am meant to be.

But it's terrifying to be reduced to nothing. It's terrifying to have everything torn away. It's terrifying to completely lose control of your life. I hate being terrified.

I want to be passionate. I want my fire. I want to feel that energy bursting through me.

So, today I have a dilemma. How fearless can I be?

I don't know the answer to that.