Follow your passion – so you can be properly disappointed

As a high school teacher, I learned to question what I was encouraging my students to do. A common source of encouragement is to ‘follow your passion’, and ‘leave your options open’. Never mind that these 2 sayings are, to some degree, contradictory, but I’ve always followed the first of these sayings in my life (the second has largely been a gift of fortunate circumstances) and found the results to be disappointing but, admittedly, sobering.

At age 15, I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker and devoted everything to this goal. I studied film in my spare time, led a school film club, made numerous short films on my weekends, and engaged a large team of students in my final year at high school to make a feature-length production. I kept my options open insofar as I still did well at my studies as well. With high-scoring graduate results, I could get into the bachelor’s degree I wanted, but I rejected this to follow my passion – I didn’t want to sit about writing essays about film; I wanted to practice the craft! I applied to the nearest prestigious film school, and, on my second attempt, scored an interview – in which, armed with my copious portfolio of studies and showreel of early works, the assessors literally ignored me. This was pretty devastating, I must admit, but I slipped into a cheap technical training college course instead and the disappointment grew: pretentious, self-centred film students, many of which did not understand cooperation or teamwork, endless funding shortfalls, unrealistic and imagined conceptions of ‘professionalism’, and no jobs. In fact, I began to realise that I did have a passion for film, but that passion largely resided in the end goals of watching the completed project, rather than in the process of production which was long-drawn-out, technically fastidious, expensive, precarious, and highly stressful. I came to the conclusion after some 5 years that filmmaking wasn’t for me. I switched to theatre for a while, which was cheaper, and funded a production a year while I worked in call centres, but, in the end, had to admit this was no career, and I couldn’t go on living like this. I don’t regret my ’10 years in the wilderness’ entirely – if I’d just gone straight to uni and some career, I would have always felt frustrated that I didn’t give writing and directing a go. Hence the moral of my story: “Always follow your passion, so you can find out how unrealistic it is.”

I did enjoy devising performance though, and I loved playing with ideas and the intellect and culture, and I suspected that perhaps becoming a teacher would be a suitable compromise which could actually earn me an okay income. So I re-enrolled in the uni course I’d deferred nearly a decade earlier (it being impossible to become a teacher without the piece of paper). My hard-earned high school scores meant nothing after 5 years, I was told, and I had to sit an entrance test, but this I passed with flying colours so I entered the amusingly languorous and intellectually irritating world of the BA, aka. the ‘Bachelor of Essay-writing’ (as “Arts” in this context is a scurrilous misnomer). Winning an award for my essays after my first year led me to ponder, “Do I really need to do this over again another 2 times?!” But eventually I made it through my degree, slapped on a post-graduate teaching degree and was snapped up by a local high school as an English and Humanities teacher. This worked out well to begin with – after the steep learning curve (and the realisation that little of what I had learned in university had any relevance to my job). Teaching did strike the right balance between intellectual interest (including elements of creative lesson-devising and performance) and earning an income. For the first time, I was motivated to get up in the morning – the days flew past – and I was earning twice the salary of my call centre and uni days. Every day included 3-5 little dramas, little engaging performances involving my students, and I whiled away the weekends devising more (and undertaking correction work). Thinking back on my 6 years in Education leads me to think of the passion: a constant rush of ideas, intellectual vigour, and a kind of constant energetic tightness across my chest – which may have been largely nervous anxiety too: to meet deadlines, to monitor hundreds of myriad interactions throughout a classroom, to finish correcting 100 essays in 3 weeks… Eventually, I had a lovely home and a partner, and we recently relocated to New Zealand due to Covid complications, and I was prepared to continue teaching in NZ, but the transition wasn’t smooth, and those 10 days in quarantine got me ruminating – and wondering why I dreaded the return. Truth was, I was burnt out, like so many teachers – by the wholly unrealistic workload. Teaching is like doing 2-3 jobs but when only given the time and pay for 1. (I used to say it was like being paid a decent wage as a newsreader on the evening news, but not realising that no one had been employed to write the stories – so you had to spend all your spare time in a state of continuous nervous energy researching the stories yourself so you don’t look foolish on the evening news.) It was exhausting, leading me to my second moral extrapolated from all this: “Follow your passion and discover that you care too much about it – at considerable cost to your health.” Which is another way of saying, “Don’t follow your passion – it’s unhealthy.” 

So the irony of all this is that I’ve ended up returning to the customer service and call centre work that used to irritate me in my twenties, when it was a necessary evil, getting in the way of my artistic pursuits. In the end, it is a sort of zen contentment, an awareness of small everyday ordinary interactions, of simple practical tasks, that need doing (and so feel useful and basically appreciated), that utilise a comfortable level of communication and mental effort, and which, when strategically negotiated (and this is a societal disgrace), still earns at least as much as that teacher with hypertension. Time passes a little more slowly, but my breaks and lunches constitute an actual adjournment, a halt, a rest – and some thoughtful reading or reflection time. I have time to exercise, and I feel relaxed and healthy. So all that passion business seems a nice occasional diversion and nothing more. Which perhaps is what all this was in aid of. “Follow your passion and, in your failure, appreciate the ordinary and the everyday.” 

Although I suspect, of course (and I should hope not), that this isn’t the end of my journey. In fact, this could be instead the ultimate dismantling of “Follow your passion” – the pathway isn’t a passionate undertaking, or some kind of boring wage-slavery, but actually a kind of transient stroll along a steadily more gentle series of undulations, passing occasionally between patches of darkness and light, and cooling shade… as befits a journey and not some costly (and largely illusory) destination.