• Note: While this is – to a degree – autobiographical, it is a fictional short story.

It’s Monday, and I’m sitting in a café in the Gangnam District of Seoul, South Korea. As I write this, I hear the sounds of the city: the music being piped through the café, the barista scooping ice for an Americano, then calling a patron’s name. The traffic noise is loudest of all, with horns honking, tires squealing, and the sirens of emergency vehicles somewhere in the distance. These sounds are somehow still foreign to me even though I’ve lived in this area for over a year.

I have been finishing work for my senior year of college as an exchange student. I’m honestly not sure what I’m going to do with myself after graduation. I would love to stay in Seoul, or maybe spend some time in Hong Kong. The truth is, I’m afraid of the future.

I tend to be the type of person who overthinks every possibility, and then ends up making decisions impulsively. People say to follow your passion, but what if you don’t know your passion?

What if you have too many passions? Worse yet, what if your passion is something at which you are utterly and completely horrible?

I, thankfully, fall under the first question. Well, maybe not “thankfully”, but at least I’m not bad at what I’m passionate about since I’m not necessarily passionate about anything. I have things I like – languages, music, writing, dancing – but I don’t think I’m truly passionate about any of them.

Then again, what exactly is passion? The Merriam-Webster Dictionary has multiple definitions for this word, but I think the one that fits best is this: “intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction.” Dictionary.com describes passion slightly differently: “any powerful or compelling emotion or feeling, as love or hate, or a strong or extravagant fondness, enthusiasm, or desire for anything.”

I guess, if I had to choose a passion, it would be music: listening to music, playing my guitar, singing; it all does something to me. Music lets me escape, become someone else, feel…something. Now, I’m not a horrible musician, but I also know I’m not good enough to make a living from music. Because of this acknowledgment of deficiency, I learn languages, so I suppose languages could qualify as a second passion of mine. When I learn a language, it opens a door. This door is the music of that language. Through this musical door I am able to experience the lives and cultures of people I could never hope to understand if I didn’t know their language.

It occurs to me now that I guess I do have passions. Now that I know what they are, though, how do I use them? What can a love of music and languages do? I have bills to pay, I need to buy food; how can I do that with these impractical passions? I wish…well, what do I wish? Even I don’t know.

“If you could be anything in the world, what would you be?” I’ve been asked this question, like so many other people, countless times over the course of my almost twenty-four years of life. I remember answering in a variety of ways: nurse, doctor, military personnel, astronaut, popstar.

One other dream that I rarely acknowledge, the dream of teaching, has stayed with me; I’ve even gone so far as to become certified to teach English as a Second Language (ESL). The summer I turned twenty saw me in China as a volunteer doing just that. I truly enjoyed it, but I also realized that teaching in a classroom is not what I want to do for the rest of my life; I much preferred the small group and one-on-one tutoring work.

I do have two dreams I’ve realized: I’ve been to China and South Korea, but what comes next? What am I planning on doing? How am I making my dreams a reality? Well, I don’t know. Do I go back to the United States and get a job teaching ESL? Do I look for a position here or in China? I really do love this part of the world….