Tasteless passion fruits

It sounds like a great resume filler: “I’m passionate about this and that.” In fact, I’m sure many of us have said it during job interviews.

But recently I’ve made the slightly unpleasant discovery that being passionate about something is just a surface-level requirement, at least in the environment that I ended up interning. So I started a little pet-project: trying to inject passion into my everyday life.

When I was younger, I wrote a speech for a public speaking contest. My closing line was: “My passion is a true friend that never dies.” I stood by those words for some odd six years until I came to work as an intern in an office in Amsterdam. It’s an editorial job, so I spend a lot of time writing there, and that’s great. Minus the occasional writer’s block, it’s been good.

Unfulfilling

But when I’m sitting down to write a piece, I have to remind myself to care about this. Truth be told, very often I don’t really care. When applying for this internship, which I’ve been doing for a few months now, it was exactly what I wanted to do. Several friends who were also looking for internships sent me this opening because they thought I would fit in. So to some extent, it works.

I write every day. It’s not the creative or opinionated writing I’m used to, but it’s something. I play with words and discover ways to use the language and sometimes my colleague says, “You sure find a way to be creative in those short blurbs you write.” In the past, I would have been ecstatic at someone with her job calling me creative. So why the hell does it feel so unfulfilling?

Disappointment

That same colleague confided in me that she’s quitting her current job in our office because it’s not the creative fulfillment that she wanted. She and I, we’re similar in that: we love writing in-depth pieces, love studying and commenting on the things we discover. “The ideal is to find a job that lets you do that.” Yeah, we agreed on that. “But there’s a limited amount of jobs that has you pick a personal project to dissect, piece by piece.”

Well, crap.

If anyone can find me a job like that, that’d be great. But I’m starting to think that maybe keeping my love for things contained is the best way to avoid disappointment.