One way to find your passion(s)

In 2014 I reached for a glass of water and my hand couldn’t hold it and it crashed on the floor. I thought I was clumsy but in the back of my mind was the fact that I have been having this pain on my arm for some time that I dutifully ignored and allotted to a series of surgeries I had following a fracture in my elbow. I was told it was expected to live with some pain forever. I was a 11 year old child when I heard this so forever really didn’t have a whole lot of meaning. I was 26 when I left the glass fall on the floor. I have been turning the head on my pain for far too long and my body wanted a word. I almost lost my ulnar nerve according to the surgeon because it was so thin of the entrapment it has been for so many years. He said that he didn’t know how I managed the pain. I didn’t know either, forever hasn’t ended. If you are like I was precisely at that time, wondering and wandering seemingly lost soul; doing something but feeling like you need to find your passion, that things that powers musicians, entrepreneurs and anyone lucky enough to declare that they do their passion then this writing might suit you. Or at least will entertain you, it’s ultimately your choice. 

Before I found the surgeon who treated me as a child and who eventually performed that last surgery as well, I saw another doctor who told me I should forget about anything computer related or using my arm for that matter, no writing no nothing. I left that appointment in tears, what did he expect me to do? All I know how to do, or like to do involves my brain but that’s just the commander, my arm is the member actually performing the duties, writing or yes using computers. More than anything the absolutism of it all put me down considerably. A sense of impending doom and shattered dreams fall upon my head. But life had other plans and I’m lucky enough to have people looking out for me for whom no is a question. So we went looking for another opinion. I had two jobs at the time and lost one for not being able to type at the speed the deadlines required me to, but mostly because I couldn’t bring myself to fully explain the whole situation to the contractor. The surgery went well, and an uncertain period of physical therapy was ahead of me. However, the doctor decided to do it in the hospital so they could keep a closer look at my progress and keep me actually resting (It’s like they knew me). That implied at least another couple of months on a hospital bed. I had already been a month there waiting for the surgery. Doing a session of physical therapy a day, filled with pain, teaching my arm how to bend and stretch again; but I was determined to move along with it, I was promised a second chance and it will not be squandered. But the therapy was a couple of hours and then I had a whole day to - what the doctor calls - rest. I figure it would be the perfect moment to catch up on books I have had on my tablet but haven’t had the time to read. As I was considering what my true passion is. I have used the time in hospitals after other surgeries in the same arm, to catch up on reading and reflect, there is not much to do. But what that time taught me I didn’t fully realize then, it came way later on: whatever you are yearning to do when you inevitably can’t do it it’s what you should be doing. All that I ferociously wanted to do while in that hospital, professionally at least, were the things that I was not sure how it weaved in my life, but the ones with the bigger impact. Of course, I don’t wish that a hospital bed and a capricious arm (or any other body part for that matter) be the event that guides you towards this kind of insight of your inclinations. Consider it an exercise. And again if you are like me in my 20s, you would have heard of questions like what would you do if you had all the money in the world? I discovered a far more powerful question for me to be what are you yearning to do when you are unable to do so? Because at that moment those are gonna yell at you, as opposed to regular times when the so-called passions whisper, whisper quietly, I like this feeling, that we let pass on the basis that our brains need surprise and impactful events to pay attention to things. The good thing is that these events can be real or imagined, our brains have little way of distinguishing one or the other, so you don’t need an arm-mageddon to untap what you are called for.