Embrace Your Passion When It Comes

These days different courses, couching sessions and blogs which are supposed to find  your passion are very popular. Maybe it is because more and more people leading    ordinary lives feel that they are lacking something important. At some point the idea  that this is how they will be  living for the rest of their lives puts them into  depressive mood. And later on they start searching for their passion. Some do find it,  some never do.

Personally I think a bit differently. Maybe that is because with me things were a bit  different. I did not look for a passion, because my passion found me instead. It came  to me  with my first writing exeperience and periodically reminded about itself ever  since.

For many years I did not take it seriously. I thought that is was nothing more than a  hobby, escape from the reality or self healing. But no matter how I avoided it hiding behind different careers it always found a way.

It took different shapes and colors – I wrote poetry, got involved with my university newspaper, took interviews, wrote short stories, became a blogger… with small but steady steps my passion started taking bigger and more important place in my life. And at some point it even squeezed out the corporate career, which was in a conflict with my passion.

So here I am, many years later… I finally realized that writing is my calling and found confidence and am able to tell that I am a writer. And it feels absolutely awesome!

This was the comparabaly serious part. Now let’s look at things lighter 🙂

So how does one know that he/she’s a writer?

I tried to look at myself from outside and here is a list I came up with.

You are a writer when (in random order):

1. Any time you’re not writing your novel you’re still thinking about it
2. Everything else you do besides writing seems to be waste of time
3. You fall in love with your characters
4. No matter what you do you still re-live the scene you finished writing that day
5. You notice small things about people and situations that no one else does
6. You want to find out more about people’s life stories so you can use some of them in your writings
7. You keep a notepad and a pen with you to write ideas, which may come anytime
8. When a day comes to end and you realize that have not written anything you feel guilty
9. When you read a book you pay attention to the writing style, quality and different writing tricks
10. You read nonstop – in different lines, waiting rooms and taxis
11. You cannot not to write
12. Writing is what you want to do for the rest of your life
13. You’re going to continue writing even if your books are not selling and will never sell
14. You are not afraid to delete words, which do not add value to your writing even if as a result your word count suffers a drastic decrease
15. You know that no matter how rich you will become, you will not stop writing
16. You cannot pass by a stationary shop even if you already have everything
17. When you talk about your upcoming novel your eyes start to sparkle
18. The only thought that someone you don’t know somewhere far away is reading what you have written makes you warm inside
19. You are not looking for your passion anymore. You have found it – it’s writing.
20. You have more books than friends

So what about you? How did you realize you were a writer and what would you add to my list?