This week my managing editor over at Odyssey challenged me and my fellow editors-in-chief to return to the roots of why we started creating content at Odyssey in the first place: to share stories of the things that we’re passionate about, stories of the things that make us inherently us. I’m not at a point in my writing where I can tell the stories of the things I’m truly, deeply passionate about and still come in under a suggested word count- so instead I ask: what is the story of your passion?

It’s easy to get wrapped up in cynicism in this day and age. The world is a big, scary, despair-inspiring place and, quite frankly, one that I often think I would rage quit if I could. Getting out of bed in the morning every day and looking around at the world and seeing increasing levels of hate and intolerance and apathy is not something that inspires me to make my life mean something, and quite frankly it’s exhausting. Cynicism (and let me tell you, I am queen of the cynics) is not an effective means to get through the day. At the end of the day cynicism may never leave you disappointed but it’s also not likely to leave you feeling personally fulfilled or even happy. Cynicism is easy- and like a lot of easy things it leads you nowhere.

So I ask of you this: what do you care about? What makes your eyes light up? What can you talk about for hours on end without tiring or feeling disinterested? Your passions are a part of you as inherently as the color of your eyes or how it sounds like a dying goat when you laugh or how you drool a little bit when you sleep and everything else in between that makes you 100% you. And when these passions fall to the wayside or become victim to a dreary 9-5 desk job existence or a grueling school schedule or get beaten out of you in some other way you are left with very little room to fuel the fire in your heart that makes a cold, unhappy world worth living in.

What story do you want to tell? Is it your story or is it the story of an obscure Austrian composer with an extra finger and a collection of Dachshunds (not sure if this guy actually exists, but if he does then I dearly hope that someone out there has a passion for him), or the story of just how darn cool this one kind of tree is, or is it the story of literally anything in between? God forbid it be the story of how there is nothing in the world that makes you light up when you tell its story. God forbid you not have an inner passion at all-because a world where anyone is truly apathetic is not a world I want to live in.