LITERARY | When the Passion, Passed On
It's another boring day at the office once again. The white walls look a little more gray than they were yesterday, the clock ticks a little slower, and the air still has that smell of stale coffee, which made me a little dizzy. I sit at my desk, staring blankly at my shaky computer as though it would suddenly talk and reveal the meaning of my miserable existence. But it never does—sadly. The same emails, the same spreadsheets, the same cycle—over and over and over again, day by day.
Everything feels like it's going around in circles. I do what I'm told, but it never seems enough. My boss calls my name again, his voice sharp, loud—as if I haven't done a single thing right since I was born. I nod, I apologize, I go back to work. But in the corner of my mind, I whisper to myself, ‘why?’
There was a time when I wasn't like this. I used to be the kid whose dreams could conquer the world—heck, even the entire galaxy. I imagined a future where I was changing lives, where my work meant something. But now, I am nothing more than an empty shell, a ghost of that dreamer who once looked at the stars with burning ambition. “Is this truly what I want?” I muttered under my breath, unsure if I even wanted to know the answer.
I sit there, confined in a gray cubicle inside a glass building, wondering how I traded those wild, impossible dreams for this fluorescent-lit prison. I am not doing this for recognition—heck, not even for purpose anymore. I work because it needs to be done. The bills aren't paying themselves, and life doesn't stop because I need to take a breather. All those years in school, staying up late to study, chasing the title of Magna Cum Laude, proving to myself that I can do it—they all led me here, to a desk job that drains me more than what it gives me.
And so, I stopped trying. Quietly. Slowly. I no longer go the extra mile trying to please the higher-ups, no longer giving pieces of my soul to a system that doesn't care about me and only cares about the money. I don't care anymore. I log in, I log out, I do just enough to survive. But eventually, they noticed, and one day, just like that, they replaced me. A name erased from the system. A chair filled by someone else. A pawn thrown out because it had done its job and no longer felt relevant. A life that goes on, with or without me.
I walk out of that building with a box in my hand and an emptiness inside my chest. For a moment, I stand at the corner of the street, lost in the sea of rushing strangers. “Now where do I go?” I wonder, as I watched people who seemed to have somewhere to be, something to do, someone waiting for them.
Here I stood, not knowing where I'd go or what I'd do next. My box felt heavier with every second, as if I had carried it every hour behind that desk. Then my phone rang. My brother's name lit up the screen, and for a moment, I considered not answering. But I did. “How was your day?” He asked. He asked cheerfully. “I got replaced,” I said. There was a moment of silence. Then he asked, “How do you feel about it?” quieter this time. I hesitated. My mouth opened, closed, then finally let out a single word—“Nothing.”
The silence that followed was unbearable. It stretched and stretched until it felt like the whole city stopped moving. Then the line clicked dead. There I was again—standing on the corner of the street, with nowhere to go but forward.
I looked at the people passing by—so full of purpose, so full of determination—and I felt the weight of thirty years crash down on me. “I wish I were them,” I thought, “full of passion, full of energy, full of dreams.” But here I was, thirty-six, no more dreams to chase. Only a quiet resignation, a quiet acceptance that maybe I was never meant to burn as brightly as I thought I would. So I took a deep breath, and took a step forward—because even without passion, life still demands that I live it, and move on.
