Noteworthy Passion

While scrolling through past entries in my Notes app, I recently found a text I’d drafted for a cousin. She had asked me, an unwitting authority, how to get into college. “Grades and test scores are great, but I think it is more important to show passion for your work,” I’d written. “Don’t just do extracurriculars to look good for colleges, do them because you actually care.”

It’s not necessarily bad advice — in fact, it’s the same advice that guided me when applying to college. Whenever I’m asked how I got into Harvard, I regurgitate everything I remember from binging SuperTutorTV videos and College Vine blogs as a high school sophomore. Inevitably, I use that monstrous word: PASSION.

The college application process taught me that a passion was my single most important possession, and I embodied that goal. I built my life around mental health advocacy — initiating elaborate passion projects, rambling in cover letters about my “life calling,” and eventually submitting a Common App essay dripping with evidence of “just how much I care.”

Let’s return to my Notes app and scroll back to 2021 and 2022 — critical years in the development of the advocacy work that would eventually lead to Ivy League admission.

Though you’d expect my notes to reflect the deep, developed passion I would eventually focus on in my personal essays, the opposite is true. This period was instead chronicled by a written battle to hold onto my basic interests and feelings through dozens of lists with titles such as “artists I find interesting,” “songs I’ve cried to,” and “things I want to write about.”

I vividly remember making these lists to fend off a growling fear that I didn’t care about anything at all. I was endlessly beating myself up for scrolling on Instagram, reading novels, or watching movies instead of saving the world. After all, if I didn’t always want to focus on my activism, I must have not actually cared about it.

Much of this doubt stemmed from the origin of my passion for mental health. As vehemently as I would have denied it in high school, my decision to become an activist was largely for the sake of college admissions.

The deepest, darkest secret of my Notes app (which I long ago deleted) was a running list titled something like “topics I could care about” — climate change, women’s rights, access to education, food insecurity, etc. Despite the backstory I frequently told explaining why I was destined for mental health advocacy, my Notes app contained the shameful reality: In many ways, my supposed passion was the result of an arbitrary choice.

To me, when you have a passion, it must be all or nothing. A passion is a life mission, a calling, a higher purpose. It brings to mind the obsessed artists and activists — think Michelangelo, Greta Thunberg, Jonathan Larson — who “can’t not” do what they are doing. It’s the Louis Armstrong type, the people who say things like: “My whole life, my whole soul, my whole spirit is to blow that horn.”

With these giants as my standard, trying to have a passion was self-destructive. Passion was a measuring stick I used to condemn everything I accomplished, if not for its miniscule impact, then for its impure motivations.

Then, it became a weapon I wielded to compare myself against my peers as I started college.

Arriving on campus, I was immediately convinced that every person at Harvard had a passion. Though my own path into Harvard was evidence that attending this school didn’t mean you were born with god-given talent and purpose, if others had also selected their passion from a Notes app list, they hid it well.

As I tried to mold a concentration and profession around this supposed life purpose, my energy for social change became terrifyingly flimsy. College forced me to seriously consider whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life in mental health advocacy. Surrounded by people who claimed their career paths and callings with such certainty, I was terrified to admit that I wasn’t sure.

Naturally, the imposter syndrome set in. Everyone else seemed perfectly motivated and ceaselessly driven towards their goal. How was it that I simply could not muster enough time, energy, and creativity to dedicate my life towards this passion?

I soon returned to my Notes app. Once again, I tried to convince myself that mental health advocacy was my life calling. Then, I tried to convince myself that I was capable of passion at all. I made pros-and-cons lists for different potential concentrations, wrote down classes that I might enjoy, and kept track of extracurricular opportunities I ought to try out.

But making these lists wasn’t as cathartic as it used to be. Opening a new note for the hundredth time, my vision would shift from the satisfying, neutral formatting of the Notes app to my own reflection on the screen. This was not the life-changing Harvard experience I had anticipated.

However, looking through the lists of my favorite movies, the dozens of classes I was looking forward to, and even the social issues I could see myself fighting for, my notes collection became something new: proof that I care. The true throughline was passion — relentless, expansive, and inextinguishable. If I was passionate about all these topics, then my imperfect commitment to one passion was not a reflection on my ability to be passionate as a whole.

The difference between having a passion and being passionate is subtle, but pulling the two apart has felt significant.

Unlike the Thunberg-esque dedication to a singular passion, being passionate is impossible to quantify or compare. Being passionate is a characteristic that can describe me so long as I choose it.

I am passionate about many things, including the advocacy work I wrote about in my Common App essay. Instead of arriving via lightning strike or divine intervention, this was a passion I strengthened through mundane inspiration, consistent engagement, and simple curiosity.

When my goal is to be passionate, Harvard stops being the place where passion goes to die. Harvard’s emphasis on academic breadth — which I used to see as contrary to the development of my singular passion — has actually made me increasingly inspired, curious, and engaged. If I let it, Harvard can help me find fulfillment as a passionate person instead of finding reason to doubt my passion.

As I navigate through campus this year, I am trying to unlearn the belief that those with a particular passion are superior. I want to celebrate passionate people (which are abundant at Harvard), instead of lauding only those whose passion is minutely concentrated.

Of course, I sometimes still wish for a singular passion that could tell me what career to have, class to take, and summer internship to apply for. But instead of waiting to find what my “whole spirit” was made to do, I’m focused on being someone who cares deeply — a description that doesn’t need to be suffixed by “about X issue” or “because of Y topic.”

Changing the way I define passion pushes me to be the person I know I want to be, not just do the things I think I want to do. Now, when I make Notes app lists of things I care about, I’ll remember that the plurality of my passion is a strength in itself.

— Magazine writer Kate J. Kaufman can be reached at kate.kaufman@thecrimson.com.