The pangs of attachment are severe enough without enshrining a loved one as the gatekeeper of our newly discovered passion. The highest tribute we can pay a loved one is to own what they have awakened in us and nurture it. In doing so, we become more capable of love, and more capable of honoring that loved one for who they truly are, without keeping them on a pedestal. After my first love moved on, it took ten years for the pedestal I’d created for her to erode. And slowly, as I met other strange messengers, as I crossed other bridges of well-being, I began to meet the world rather than hide from it. I began to enter life rather than sort and rank the living.

Often, our passion for a particular way of being is driven by others into a grand goal of becoming, as if life doesn’t reside in who we are but only in the dream of what we might become. In the same way that the loved one can be seen as the keeper of our gift, our idealized ambition—becoming a rock star or a famous writer or a celebrated photographer—can be seen as the keeper of a role that will let us truly live, if we can just reach it. In this way, we misconstrue what is ever-present within us as some far-off possibility. In this way, we become dependent on our ambition to define us rather than our true nature.

It’s fine to work toward goals, as long as we believe in the work and resist deifying the goals. When our life-force appears as a passion that we put off inhabiting by hiding it in some future ambition or goal, we stall our growth. And without our knowing, the joy of singing is distilled into a dream of being recorded. The transformation of writing is condensed into a need to be published. A love of seeing, manifest through painting or photography, is inverted into a need to be seen.

Like so many young writers, I thought that being published would validate my identity in some idealized future. I was secretly desperate to be seen by others, when I really needed to see myself and feel where my soul joins with the rest of life. I was full of misplaced labor. But thankfully, life has many strange messengers to reduce us to who we are. Thankfully, there are many unexpected bridges that bring us humbly to where we are.