What Do Your Activities Say About You?

I recently made a realization about my passion for dance. You can draw a parallel between dance and how I live my life. I like routines. Steps. Instructions. And I like to master those steps. It takes me a bit to get it down sometimes, but then once I have it, I have it forever, and it makes me feel confident and capable. Same goes for dance. There is choreography. There are steps. You know what comes next. You have to pay attention in class to know what step comes next, and you have to execute that step correctly. It’s just another extension of that part of my personality. I need to know what comes next, and I need to master that set of instructions. Just another manifestation of my need for control and my need for perfection. Only better, because it gives me some confidence about my body and appearance, as well.

(On a side note, that’s what I didn’t like about some of my engineering classes. In high school you learn steps and you implement those steps, and then you get the right answer. In engineering you have to learn how to think that way. There are no steps. The steps change from problem to problem. You have to make up your own steps, but they have to end up being the correct steps. Like a new maze for each problem. There wasn’t a pattern I could find. It sucked for me. I made it through, but as you can see, that’s not how I live my life, so I didn’t enjoy it.)

What do your hobbies, careers and/or passions in life say about you?

I just recently explained that it really isn’t a surprise that one of my friends likes video games, because he loves to take control and conquer obstacles in real life, as well. That’s not the only reason you can like video games, but you can tell that’s what he gets out of it. At least from what I can see.

What you like to do says something about the strengths and weaknesses of your soul.

Even my wanting to help others says something about me. I had the perspective that no one cared about me my whole life. I felt like an outcast - forgotten, mocked and disrespected by my peers, and never good enough for my parents. The reality was not as bad as that, but that’s how I perceived everything, and every experience I had got filtered this way to back it up. Because I believed it, I set myself up for failure to continue to receive the same horrible experiences over and over that I interpreted the same horrible way over and over.

My point is that I want to reach out to others and show them that someone cares and understands them, because that is what I so desperately wanted all my life. Someone to truly care about me and understand me. So it really is no surprise that I would want to give that to others.

Think about your activities and your passions. Can you find the deeper meaning behind them? Does that help you understand yourself better? Can you give back to the world based on these passions?