The pressure / starts really young / and / it goes your whole life, / but it’s perhaps most pronounced when you’re graduating from school, / right? // Everyone says, “Wow, / the world's at your feet! // What are you gonna do now?” // And it’s so intimidating, / it's like / picking a major / for life. // You know, / I had a hard enough time picking a major / for four years / and I changed that once, / if not twice. // I mean it was like / just intimidating, / right? // And this compelling / I mean this / really, you know, / forceful cultural imperative to choose your passion, / it’s stressful to me, / but it’s not just me, / it’s everyone I talk to agrees with me. // The woman who sold me this dress. // I told her what I needed the dress for, / what I was talking about / and she said, / “Oh my gosh, / I... / I really need to hear this talk, / because I just graduate from school. // My friends and I, / we don’t know what we’re passionate about, / we don’t know what we supposed to do.” // I’m leery of passion for a few reasons. // But one of them / is that / passion is not a plan, / it’s a feeling. // And feelings change. // They do. // You can be passionate about a person one day, / and a job, / and then not passionate the next. // We know this / and yet we continue to use passion as the yardstick / to judge everything by, / instead of seeing passion for what it really is: / the fire that ignites / when you start rubbing sticks together. // Anyway, / I was such a mess when I was in my twenties, / such a mess. // I was anxious / and depressed / and had no life to speak of, / I was temping / to keep my options open, / and I was sitting around at night in my underwear watching Seinfeld reruns. // Actually, / I still do that, / that’s not the worst thing in the world to do. // It’s fine. // But I called my mother / every night crying / and I was turning away / perfectly good / full-time jobs. // Why? // Because I was afraid. // I was sure that I would pick the wrong one / and get on the wrong train / headed to the wrong future. // My mother begged me, / she said, / “Please, / take a job, / any job. / You’re not going to be stuck, / you’re stuck now! // You don’t / create your life first, / and then live it. // You create it / by living it, / not agonizing about it.” // She’s right, / she’s always right. // And so I took a full-time job / as an assistant / at a management consulting firm, / where I knew nothing about nothing. // Okay. // Zero. // Except / I knew I had a reason to get up in the morning, / get showered, / leave the house, / people who were waiting for me when I got there / and I got a paycheck every two weeks. // And that / is as good a reason to take a job as any. // Did I know / that if I want to be an office administrator for the rest of my life? // No! // I had no idea! // Truly! // But this idea that everything you're supposed to do / should fit into this passion vertical / is unrealistic. // And I’ll say it / - elitist. // You show me someone who washes windows for a living / and I will bet you a million dollars / it’s not because / he has a passion for clean glass. //