Photo by Ashley Levinson on Unsplash
Nobody asks you that question. Not your parents. Not your school. Not your manager in your annual appraisal. Not the form you fill at the doctor’s office or the bank or the government office that wants seventeen documents and a photograph.
Nobody asks what you’re all in on. What you’d do without being paid for it. What you think about when the meeting is going on too long. What you’d choose if the weekend had no obligations and the phone had no notifications.
Nobody asks what makes you, you.
So we will.
The thing about passion
Passion has a bad reputation in polite conversation. It gets questioned. Minimised. Treated as something lesser than the serious business of life. But anyone who has ever been genuinely, irreversibly in the grip of something they love knows that passion is nothing like that. It isn’t recreational. It isn’t seasonal. It doesn’t clock out.
It shows up uninvited and refuses to leave.
What exactly is an ism?
An ism is what passion becomes when it deepens into something larger than itself. Something you do becomes something you are. You cycle on weekends becomes you are a cyclist. You read before bed becomes you are a reader. You make good coffee in the morning becomes you are someone for whom coffee is not a beverage but a belief system.
This transformation is never planned or announced. It happens quietly, through accumulated moments of choosing the thing you love over the things that merely make sense. That deepening is your ism beginning.
What identity has to do with it
There is a difference between being interested in something and being defined by it. Interests are things you follow. Isms are things that follow you. You can lose interest in something. Put it down, move on, find something else. Interests are portable and exchangeable and perfectly fine to outgrow.
An ism is different. It is the thing that has already decided it isn’t going anywhere. The thing that wakes up when you wake up. That colours how you see everything else. That connects you instantly and deeply to the people who share it, before you’ve even learned each other’s names.
Your ism is the most honest version of who you are.
The moment it chose you
Nobody falls into an ism gradually and consciously. Nobody sits down one day and decides today I will become someone whose entire identity is shaped by this thing I love. It happens differently.
There is a moment. Sometimes small, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes disguised as an ordinary day. A moment when something shifts inside you and the thing you thought you were just trying becomes the thing you cannot imagine stopping. You didn’t choose that moment. It chose you. And everything after it was just you catching up to who you already were.
You vs The World
The world has a habit of calling it a hobby. A phase. Something smaller than it is. The world is wrong. Your ism is not a distraction from life. It is the part of life that makes the rest of it worth showing up for.
It is who you are. Not what you do on weekends. Not how you fill the time between obligations. But who you actually are when nobody is asking you to be anything else. And you already know what it is. You’ve known for a while. You just haven’t always had a word for it that felt big enough. Now you do.
What’s your ism?