"A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings but a cat does not." -Ernest Hemingway

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

What's your passion?

Many words can be found to describe passion, for example, desire.  There are times we desire something we don’t have or have a sudden urge to change our circumstances.  For us writers, passion is what drives us.  It’s a desire that never seems to be fulfilled. 
For many years I always had this urge to be a writer, but I never knew how to become one.  I assumed if you didn’t go to college and get a degree in fine arts or literature, you could never become a writer.  So being that I never achieved any of those accolades, I thought I was destined to become someone who just thought about being a writer.  Through all those lost years I continued to have a deep seeded passion that never left my conscious.  What I didn’t realize at the time was seeing a pattern developing in my life . . . a pattern that every time I experienced tragic, I had a deep down desire to write about it. 
It wasn’t until the death of my mother and grandmother, less than 24 hours apart, that the pattern started to take shape.  As usual, upon that tragic day, I felt this overwhelming need to somehow tell the story of how they influenced my life.  I suppose I’m like many writers out there who write because of pain, however, my pain was long in the making.  You see my mother and grandmother were there for me the day I almost died.  How’s that for a hook?  See my post about a hook here.  You see I’m one of the lucky few who have survived a severely broken neck and continue to walk and talk about it. 
Why is it when we’re young we think we are invincible and that the relatives before us never learned their lessons the hard way?  Are we just being naive or is it more than that?  Perhaps our inexperience is part of our destiny, which becomes our journey . . . our passion.

I clearly remember my grandmother praying over me as I lay upon the stark white sheets of my hospital bed and my mother never, and I mean never, leaving the hospital while I struggled to survive.  It has taken 27 years from that fateful moment and nine years since saying goodbye to the most influential women in my life to finally discover my passion in life; the passion to write.

What's behind your passion to write?   Every life has a story . . . what’s yours?

Next week I'll talk about how finding my passion led to finally putting pen to paper.

Until next time,

Keep on striving, keep on thriving and keep on writing!

T.K. Millin
The Unknown Author        

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