So here I am...writing

So here I am, writing. Quite obviously stated I know, but I feel the need to explain this sudden re-occurrence of an old passion. Writing, for me, is not at all a new past-time or hobby. No, I have always loved to write creatively. The desire came to surface during my high school days, when I was assigned creative writing essays in my English class. I would relish those assignments, mulling of the themes and topics and the different ways I could express my thoughts. I would always wait patiently for my creativity to arrive (which it always did eventually, at its own convenience) and together we would create a little piece of myself on paper. My essays always did my teacher proud, as well as my mother, who still to this day insists that, one day, I will come to my senses and quit my well paying, stable career in finance and become a writer.
My mother’s fantasies about my career seemed to make some sense at first. After all, weren’t we taught from grade school that we should pick our career based on our hobbies and pastimes? That might be a popular method of career choosing for many, but for me, I disagree with it completely. To me, hobbies are about separating yourself from the stress, pressures and demands of work and allowing yourself to run wild in the freedom of your interests. We have complete control of our hobbies because we do them at our leisure. By turning them into our career, they would then have complete control of us, because we would need it to survive. What could be worse than taking something that we love and turning it into our source of income? It’s like sending our children to work to help pay the bills, abusive and unfair.
However, this is not to say that a job can’t be enjoyable nor that we can’t use our talents within our career. But I know that if my financial and professional success were reliant on a favorite pastime, it would no longer be a favorite pastime, it would be a job, another boss to answer too. I would become angry and frustrated with it when it would not function as needed. With writing, this could be especially dangerous, since it is a creative hobby. I do consider myself a creative person, but not at my own disposal. I have creative moments that awaken at random that I must harness in that exact moment or it is gone until who knows when. Should I be relying on this fickle friend of mine for money, I would find that my rent would be perpetually late and my credit score shot. The biggest danger, even above the financial instability, is the risk of abusing your passion to the point of disdaining it. Any one thing, if it is done to the extreme, will begin to annoy and be resented by the user. That is why so many Americans face a mid-life crisis, because they wake up one day and realize what they thought they loved to do and revolved their career around, they were actually quite sick of, and were left with nowhere to go from that point on. And should that job also be your pastime, you are not only losing your career but also a part of yourself. A job that is part of you is not disposable. And that is the main reason why I chose a career in finance. It is a career that is stable and allows me fund my life, while also giving me the comfort of knowing I can leave it at any point should my heart so desire, because it is not a part of who I am. My hobbies and talents, however, are, and I want to cherish and nurture them, so they can grow up into something strong, stable, and mature, and maybe one day, like children, they might be able to give back to me all I have invested in them.