When you apply for college, everyone tells you to talk about your “passion.” Are you passionate about dance? Talk about that! Are you passionate about climate change? Volunteer, and then write about it. College admission advice-givers try to distill the complexity of a teenager into a single “passion.”
When I was a senior in high school, I didn’t exactly have a singular passion like many of my friends. This was a source of stress for me. I enjoyed nordic skiing, swimming, The Grapes of Wrath, and making splatter paint Jackson Pollock knock-offs in my garage but I didn’t have an activity or a cause or an art form to which I was wholeheartedly dedicated. I didn’t have language like “interdisciplinary” to describe my varied interests in the overlaps of things. I hadn’t yet left the home that inspired my passion for place theory.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I don’t really remember how I came to decide to major in environmental studies or English. The decision just happened naturally without much labor of thought, cost-benefit analysis, or trying things on for size. Likewise, I don’t remember having a burning passion for Romantic poetry or for landscape history as a first-year college student. I liked things, sure, but I didn’t latch onto to anything and think: this is what I want to do forever.
Passion and identity are deeply intertwined.When you have a deep passion for something, people notice and label you with that passion. Dancer. Portlander. Coffee drinker. Skier. Sometimes, it works the other way around. Your identities, such as where you’re from or what you do, might become your passions after a long enough time of going through the motions or simply liking something. For me, being from Idaho and being a English/Environmental Studies double-major are two identities that just happened to turn into passions. Once something becomes both a passion and an identity, these categories mutually reinforce each other.
So, I suppose its rather serendipitous that I haphazardly decided to study the things I want to study forever. My academic life, once an endeavor of going-through-the-motions, was transformed by the classes, readings, professors, and peers I have encountered at Lewis & Clark. I remember Introduction to Environmental Studies being one of those moments. I was recently going through my notes from that class and encounters a note to myself about taking ENVS 350: Environmental Theory. I am currently taking this theory class, an elective at an infamously early hour, because I am committed to cultivating my passion for the foundations and connections between different environmental studies. I want to go to grad school in this field. Comparing my statement of passion from 2013 to today, I can guarantee that I have a far more convincing and honest array of passion cards to play.
Two final thoughts: First, passions are unpredictable. This is a lesson taught over and over in romantic comedies: it (love, passion, happiness, whatever) happens where/when/how you least expect it. I would not have predicted the academic and career-related passions I have now at any moment in my childhood. Second, passions are not linear. They are not singular. They change. They disappear and reappear. As I get older, I notice how people change passions many times throughout their lives and it gives me hope that I won’t feel stuck. Splatter paint to place theory, my passions have grown and moved and changed and I am excited to discover where they will take me next. But for now, I will dive back to the intersectionality of environmental justice and the science wars of the 1980s.