Stick With Your Passion, Even If It Changes

This post was written by a CSU Channel Islands Service Learning student, featuring art from Pacific High School students.

It almost always feels like everyone around you has something they are very passionate about. Whether your peers are amazing athletes, or musically gifted, to other random hobbies, it can be very easy to feel lost if you do not believe you have a passion. In getting lost it is easy to spiral towards habits that are unhealthy. This is what happened to me in late middle school towards early high school. 

All my life I was playing team sports but I was never the best on the team. When it came to soccer I was not fast enough, in baseball I was not coordinated enough, and in basketball I could not shoot nor play defense. And then I found football. I started playing football in sixth grade and fell in love. I was a lot taller than all the other kids so it was easy for me to move around the defense line. I wasn’t the biggest kid but I was tall and could get off on the snap pretty fast. 

For four years football was my passion. I would not let anything get in the way of it. My freshman year of high school, my peers started experimenting with drugs and alcohol but I wanted none of it because football was my life, and I wanted nothing to do with something that could hinder my ability to play the sport. But sophomore year came along and I lost sight of football. My passion for the game was gone and soon enough I fell into the same hole that my peers fell into. 

For a year I was not doing anything except partying with my friends because I did not have a passion that kept me away from all of that. And then I found a new passion in surfing. I grew up around the water, and  surfed a few times, but at that time football was still my passion and I was more into that than anything in the ocean. But once I found a new passion that I could never have dreamed of, all of those old habits died. I found something that kept me very active and helped clear my mind from all the problems that were going on. I had the feeling that football gave me early on except this time, I knew it was going to last. Having a passion not only helped me meet people but it also saved me from spiraling down a deep hole that I may not have come out of. 

There are so many things to be passionate about but the most important thing is that you make sure it helps you, helps you clear your mind of everything that is going wrong, and makes you feel like yourself.