Far Removed

What is my passion?  I'm an author, a musician, and a cartoonist.  I greatly enjoy thinking about linguistics and philosophy.  I like analyzing ideas, disassembling them, and trying to find ways in which they might be repurposed.  These are all for me intellectual pursuits and I enjoy them as tasks I can analyze.  I like best the parts I have to think the most about.  But I don't know whether these interests are passions or not. It seems to me that the word "passion" involves emotional investment and that it implies catharsis.  I don't experience catharsis.  I do the things I like best to do because they are gratifying as cognitive exercises.  Must one's passions be emotionally gratifying?  Perhaps not.  Perhaps a passion is any nonessential thing one voluntarily does repetitively, seeking pleasure of any kind.  That is a generous definition and by it I can say that I have just as many passions as the next person.  I am ...

I used to care very much what people thought of me.  As a teenager I was desperate to integrate.  I didn't fit in and it drove me crazy.  The world seemed made to reject me, but I didn't see that society is not the world.  I invested in what people thought because I believed winning acceptance was the only path to happiness.  I couldn't have known then what I know now because I had barely been alive.  I hadn't existed long enough to see the world beyond society. I know now that people's opinions are ephemeral.  Good or bad, the thoughts anyone has had about me have been drops in the oceans of their lives.  I remember being made fun of, and when it was happening it was like an apocalypse.  From grade school to high school I was tormented by ridicule and rejection.  But that's over.  There's no resolution to seek now, no balm for the past.  Whether or not I should have been treated in any particular way is an infertile discussi...