When Passion Becomes Pressure
The legendary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham once said…
“A dancer dies twice — once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.”
But what exactly is that first death? It’s when they no longer feel anything for something they once loved.
And as a student about to enter college, this has become a fear I’ve started thinking about more often than I’d like to admit. Because it’s terrifyingly easy to turn something that makes your heart beat into something that stops it.
I’ve always wanted to study medicine. I’ve been actively learning about the human body, and I love being able to use that knowledge to preserve human life. Since grade seven, I decided to fully commit myself to becoming a doctor, but I’ve also accepted how hard the path would be, with most of my life spent behind classrooms and lecture halls. All because i believe my energy would be worth it. So, no matter how cringe that might sound, I mean it when I say medicine makes my heart beat. That’s why I worry a lot about whether my efforts would be pointless once i realize my passion isn’t enough to carry me through everything I’ll face. What if one day learning medicine will no longer make my heart beat, and that I won’t be able to say, “This will be worth it”?
When it comes to college, I’m sure many students might feel the same. Many people may ask you “what course are you going for?” and you often answer based on what you can see yourself doing. Some can be completely certain, while others can still answer that they’re undecided. But all of us are making a bet on our future based on what we love in the present, even while knowing that college will change us. And so, obviously, you put in the effort to make sure that bet falls on the winning side, because you know soon enough that it will be worth all the passion you put into it.
The problem arises when life’s stresses outweigh that, because then, making mistakes and simply learning for the love of it suddenly becomes very expensive. Mistakes costs time, money, and energy, not just yours but those of the people who came along with you. It becomes pressurizing. So ultimately, there will be a point in your life where you’d question whether your love will be worth the burden you’d soon carry. So how do you not let it consume you?
The way I do it starts by remembering where the passion came from — why you love it. That should be first because you need to identify what you’re actually trying to preserve, or at least why you’re into it in the first place. Maybe you love medicine because of being able to study life, or engineering because of learning how everything works. Even outside college, maybe you just love to learn because its concepts just click so well with you, or you love art because of making your imagination come to life. Even if it’s something small like a tiny spark of curiosity or interest, hold on to it. Soon enough, it’ll become something you want to chase after without feeling tired.
The next thing would be to shift your focus toward that reason. This is where the separation between love and requirement becomes more apparent, because the latter is where the stress can grow. With love, you can still make mistakes while being able to love the process. You can still stumble while being able to move forward. And you can still fail while being able to say you don’t regret anything.
Take your grades for example. You tell yourself to study for GPA of 96, to get into a certain university. You can remind yourself that you’re studying because you genuinely want to understand your lessons. Of course, you still need the grades, you still need to get into that university. But the grades don’t become the only reason you’re studying. And in general, it applies to a lot of things outside college or school because it makes it less stressful once you associate a certain activity with something that helps you move forward.
This, in turn, helps make your environment easier to love something in. The opposite of that is someone who does the thing they love but still ends up miserable. Because if every attempt to learn is followed by exhaustion, comparison, and fear of failure, your brain will eventually start linking it with those feelings. The result? It turns the passion into pressure. And this connects fairly well with the previous point because an environment where growth won’t cost you your insanity makes it easy to improve while still being happy with what you do.
Then there’s the case of doing something you love but simply not having the energy to do so. In the same environment, you should give yourself the ability to rest. Being exhausted can make something you adore into a chore. It sounds cliche, but it makes sense, and I believe it’s something we’ve all heard before. It’s as simple as recharging your phone. The only way to use it at its best is to charge it until it’s ready. So whenever something feels heavy, drop it for a bit and then come back again.
Another important note: resting isn’t the same as stopping. There’s a big difference between…
“I don’t want to do this today”
and
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“I don’t want to do this ever”
The former still means you have the ability to come back to it, just at another time. The latter means quitting, and maybe never starting again.
Finally, the last thing I’d like to give you: don’t make your passion your entire identity. It might sound a little disconnected from the res, it but there’s a difference between what you love and who you are. This goes back to why I’m scared of losing my interest for medicine, because at the back of my head I’d ask myself…
”If I won’t be a doctor, then what will I be?”
“If my grades didn’t matter, who would I be?”
Maybe some of you are asking those yourselves. But one day, you’ll answer them knowing you’re still a person outside of the things you accomplish.
You still have friends, you still have your family, and you still have the little things you enjoy when nobody’s grading you for them.
You’re still someone who looks out for others.
Someone who leads with confidence and humility.
Someone who anyone can have fun with.
None of those things disappear just because you decide to take a different path. And I think that’s important to remember, especially when we’re so used to introducing ourselves through what we want to become.
Your passion can be a part of you without becoming all of you.
And this goes hand in hand with everything else. Remembering why you started, shifting your focus, taking breaks, and allowing yourself room to enjoy things and become more than your achievements all make one thing a little easier to accept:
Change.
Because eventually, you might realize that the path you chose isn’t the path you want anymore. Maybe your interests change. Maybe your priorities change. Maybe you discover something about yourself as you walk along that path. But that doesn’t mean you failed. It doesn’t mean the passion you had before was misplaced or fake, and it doesn’t mean your efforts were in vain. You just changed.
So the first death Martha was talking about? Maybe it’s not something we need to fear. Maybe its about learning to love something enough to pursue it and to let it shape us without being afraid it would disappear, regardless of what we choose.
Because one day, even when we stop dancing, we can still leave the stage knowing something else greater awaits us, while still feeling as alive as the first time we came in.
