Scales

“It is the soul’s duty to be loyal to its own desires. It must abandon itself to its master passion.” –Rebecca West

This week I had a very enlightening conversation about the perils of feeling like I had to choose between my passion and my responsibilities. Subconsciously repressing my passion and creativity the past couple of months has been somewhat depressing. I’ve been wanting to write for so long but the words weren’t coming to me. The overthinking was disheartening.

Writing is one of my passions. It always has been ever since I became aware of how vast my imagination was. Ever since I became aware of the creativity I possessed and was blessed with. But with that came the reality of responsibilities and things that took precedence.

Priorities.

It’s a no brainer to put work, school, family (not particularly in that order) as priorities because they are. Trust me they are.

But categorizing our passions as options isn’t fair. Especially if they burn like a wildfire within us. There’s no denying them. There’s no need to deny them.

But sometimes we do. Sometimes we feel the pressure of our priorities, and they can overshadow the desires that bring joy to our souls. We often get overwhelmed with our priorities; we want to make sure we’re upstanding employees at our jobs, present with our families and good students at school. Like I said before, all of those are very important, those are important to me as well. But I know the feeling of our passion(s) still burning only to have them slowly extinguish from time to time. We don’t want to be deemed irresponsible if we put any or maybe too much focus on them and on the flip side, actually getting that burst of creativity is exciting but sometimes we become crippled with exhaustion to actually be able to focus on it.

At the end of the day, moving our passions from being an option to apart of our priorities should be an objective we can attain.

So where does the healthy balance lie?

How can we level the scales?