My Blogs

Today, I am thinking about how hard it is to bring back a passion from our childhood. And especially because it needs to come from us. Nobody else has the drive and motivation to do so. We are now responsible for parenting ourselves and meet our own needs.

When I was fourteen and starting at high school, all I did was study. Everyday after school, I would go to my bedroom, sit at my desk, and do all the homework until it was time for dinner. By then, I had stopped writing stories, my childhood passion. I was barely going out with friends, and had become a teenage hermit. Little did I know that pleasing my parents and society in general had become my priority. I had abandoned myself and my passions already by then.

One day, my mother came to tell me that she had enrolled me for flamenco classes twice a week. The dancing studio was nearby, and I would be able to go walking. I was angry at her! Didn’t she know how difficult school was now, and how much I needed to study? Yes, she did. But she refused to let my anger drive the decisions.

My first day, I went in a fury. I was stressed, and also very shy. I didn’t know what to expect. Well, dancing became another of my passions, discovered at a time I had lost interest for all the others. I absolutely loved it! It brought me a sense of self-confidence that I had lost, and a sense of love for life again. Each evening after dancing, I would go home, have dinner and do my homework, going to bed later than usual. I didn’t care. I was more efficient. And especially, it gave me so much joy!

It took me a few years to realize how my mother had seen me shut down from life to become the perfect girl, with A+ scores and no life. She opened my life to passions and possibility again, and I became a joyful teenager.

As an adult, most of us have nobody next to us to push us towards recovering our passions. In many cases, our partners or close friends don’t even know about our dreams, so buried we have them in our hearts. But even if they did, or even if they pushed us towards them, we might refuse, full of fears of not being good enough, making excuses such as lack of time or space or money… And more importantly: if we really want to recover our past dreams, we need to do it ourselves: the day we become aware of how important they are in our lives, how much they contribute to our sense of joy and fulfilment, that very day when we make it a priority in our life, is the day we demonstrate self-love, for some of us for the very first time in a long time.

Don’t wait for tomorrow to bring back your long-forgotten dream. If it gave you so much joy in your past, if you are dreaming to have it back with you, give it a priority! It’s your soul talking to you.

Often in our midlife, we tend to look back and think of what we have achieved. It usually happens when we feel unfulfilled, when something falls apart in our lives. It might be a broken marriage, the death of a loved one, our children leaving home, or a feeling of dread and not being able to keep going the way we have for years on end.

We know we need to change something, and yet we don’t know what, or where to start. It is in these moments that we often look at our childhood, and find that there were things that brought us joy, things we could focus on for hours on end. We remember the feeling of pure happiness, and we long to bring that back to our lives.

Usually, that passion from our childhood is related to some kind of art. We might have loved to paint, taking paintings and a canvas wherever we went. We might have loved to invent stories, lost in whole different Worlds. Maybe we loved to play an instrument that brought us so much joy. Or we loved to dance in our bedroom until we would fall exhausted.

Whatever our passion was, we tend to leave it aside as we grow up, thinking we have “more important things to do”. Until the day, decades later, when we discover how much we missed that passion. But we are lost. We don’t know how to bring it back to our lives. How can we include it in our busy lives? We have no time, we are too busy. And who cares anyways?

So most of us leave it aside and try to keep pushing with our unhappy lives. And then we see how others have achieved it, and wonder how they did it, how they brought back their passion to their lives, thinking they must have found a complex formula that you don’t have.

But the truth is, it’s much easier than what we all think. It’s a step by step process.

And the very first step is commitment to yourself. As easy (or as difficult) as that.

My passion for writing goes as far as I remember. Writing was my deepest joy as a child. I loved creating stories and getting lost in my imagination. Until I left it behind to focus on my studies.

Years later, in my thirties, I had the deep need to bring it back, but didn’t know how. Eventually, I took part in a short-story competition and won the second prize for my story “A trip to Vienna”. It gave me a huge boost and I took three courses on creative writing. I loved every part of them. But the same process will happen over and over again: I would be enthusiastic about the course and doing my assignments, and then I would stop writing as soon as the course finished. I wasn’t getting anywhere.

Until the day I told myself, after having finished my third course, that this time I would not stop writing. I had a deep realisation that writing gave me so much joy. It was making a difference in my life. Why would I stop doing it?

I still had a busy life, a demanding job, and a small child to look after, and no family nearby to help. Nothing had changed in the outside.

But I had deeply changed inside: for the first time in my life, I had given importance to my needs. Before realising it, that day I started shifting my people-pleaser pattern for a life where there would be space for my passion, for my joy and fulfilment, and I would make it work.

That day changed my life. There was no way back. And a few years later, just before last Christmas, a box arrived home. It contained the copies of my first novel, “A trip towards the sunset”. It was a long and painful journey that brought me so much joy and an amazing reward.

My passion is to help clients recover their past passions and help them bring back a live of joy and fulfilment.

If you need my help, feel free to contact me. I’d love to hear from you!