Curious or Confused?
It’s time I start telling this tale, despite not knowing the ending. This pursuit didn’t start overnight, but it did kick into gear with a trip to the bookstore. I knew books would have the answers I needed. Browsing at Barnes & Noble, I found a sequel to “Wishcraft”, and the TOC had the term “multi-passionate” which I’d learned about online, and I highly identify with it. (This term is pretty much exactly what it sounds like - a person has several, maybe even fluctuating, passions, as opposed to the one or few that most people seem to have.)
At this point, I wasn’t financially ready to put heaps of money toward this search. So, I checked my phone to see if the “free” resource had this book. The library did not have this particular iteration of “Wishcraft”, but they did have the original, so I went and picked it up. I think it was the next day, but I took this and one other book to a coffee shop and got started - this was on May 23, 2022, the most definitive day I can look back to and say, ‘This is where it started.’
Earlier I mentioned that this didn’t start overnight. Before this day in May 2022 with two books, I’d recently started a data analytics course. Before that, I tackled free resources to start learning data analytics, to see if the cost of the course was worth it for me. Before that, is when I’d learned about “multi-passionate”. In February, I bought a 360 camera so I could start a motovlog channel. (Which I did this month!) Even earlier in the year, on January 2, I posted a TikTok of a bunch of notes on what I want in the future and what career paths I might like to use to get there, but it was not very conclusive.
I know I have hints from even before 2022. I have notes from a book, “Finding Your Element”, from June of 2021. I checked that out from the library along with a couple others people usually go to like “What Color is My Parachute” and “StrengthsFinder”. Neither of these two did anything for me; the parachute one was nearly useless. But the element one did inspire and motivate me enough to start writing bits down - both from the book and my thoughts at the time. Reading them now, my ‘life vision’ was about as blurry as possible, like when your eyes are open the tiniest bit, and you’re looking through the water in your eyes.
Wherever it began (2019 is the earliest possibility), I’d never worked this hard to find such answers before. I don’t mean that prior I’d spent my years intentionally aimless. Growing up, I had the perspective that opportunities would present themselves; I was taught this. In particular for choosing a career, I expected I would have a ‘eureka moment’. The contributing factors in my life did not effectively explain that to find it I would have to work and search and try out options. These factors also definitely made no mention that they could be wrong. This is 2023 Bryan writing, and, spoilers, I haven’t had a ‘eureka moment’.
At least for people enough like me, I don’t think we’re going to have one. I mean, how could a particular career path ‘click’ in my mind as the right one when I’m a multi-passionate person? One path isn’t the answer at all, regardless of which path. I think it’s going to be more like layers, each layer being one of many passions. I don’t have infallible, good reason for this approach, but staring at books and notes has stalled out. It’s time to try things. It’s time for action. So I did. I took action. You’re reading it! This one of four “layers” that I’ve started with. Maybe I’ll have to retire a layer. Maybe these chosen layers will only work if I add one more I never thought of. Only Future Bryan will be able to share those details. But for me, “layers” is so much better and has so much more potential than a standard job where I’d be doing one thing most of the time, with few chances per year to branch out a tiny bit.
So, know that as I post here, that this story doesn’t have a conclusion yet. But I’m ready and excited to share it when I find it. However, I don’t think that’s the interesting part. The interesting part is right now - the actions I’m taking to get there. The search so far has also had some interesting twists, and I’ll be putting those parts of the story up, too. Right now, I have 184 pages of notes, starting with that day in the coffee shop. I call this soul search, this life’s homework, “The Shape of My Dream.”