Doing What We Love*

This piece was originally posted on October 4, 2011. It is being re-posted as part of our CHICKS ROCK! Summer Retrospective, during which we will post a combination of new content and posts from the past. Enjoy!

Why do we stop ourselves from doing the things we love? I’ve been struggling lately (and by “lately,” I mean at least a year) with this question.

I have a friend who wants to be an actor and moved to New York partly to pursue that. When I ask him about it, he’s never much closer to taking his acting seriously than he was the time I asked before that. Another aspiring actor studied theatre in college and hasn’t gone on any auditions or even gotten headshots. I also have a friend who used to dance and was quite talented but had to stop years ago. Even though she now has some time and resources to start dancing again, it’s too emotional for her to even try.

All my life, I’ve loved to sing. When I stopped singing regularly with a chorus (or “for real,” as I like to call it), I lost confidence in my ability and eventually it became harder and harder to think about doing it again. Similarly, for the past few months, I’ve found it harder to sit down and write something substantial – one of the things I love doing most. I write here once a week, but it’s nothing like what I used to write when I used to write “for real.”

So I have to ask why it is that we stop ourselves from doing the things we love. I wonder if we don’t think we’re good enough, but it doesn’t seem that simple. I think maybe we don’t think we’re worthy of doing something we truly enjoy – something that has the potential to make us truly happy. Whatever it is, I’m trying to get us all out of our funk. However big or small our steps are, I’m hoping my friends and I can all get back on track… I imagine we’d all be at least a bit more fulfilled.