It started with a blank notebook and a hike I didn’t want to take. My mom had insisted. This was typical of her—we needed “fresh air,” she’d say, like it was a vitamin you could overdose on if you didn’t ration screen time. I was 12, trudging up one of our usual trails in the Wasatch Mountains. The notebook was in my backpack because I’d been tasked with writing something—anything—when we reached the summit. She called it “practicing gratitude.” At the time, I was about as jazzed about gratitude as I was about cleaning out our minivan.

The summit, though, was harder to argue with. Expanses of orange-tipped trees spread out like a quilt; the jagged peaks looked sharp enough to slice the sky. I pulled my notebook out, unscrewed the cap of a Pilot G2 pen, and…paused. I had no idea what to write until I realized, Hey, no one’s going to read this. So, I ditched the prompts my mom had circled in red ink on a sticky note and wrote a very detailed account of exactly how miserable it was to carry a backpack uphill. I gave the backpack feelings, a bad attitude, and a vendetta against my little 12-year-old body. And I became hooked.

At that moment, I found joy in something I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying. That notebook entry wasn’t gratitude; it wasn’t even nice. But it was mine. That was the first time I tasted what it was like to take raw experience—whether good, bad, or sweat-drenched—and turn it into something vivid, something alive.

Epiphany Served Three Ways

If my first joyful encounter with writing was a mountainside meltdown, my second and third were just as unexpected. Passions, it turns out, don’t arrive all polished and obvious, tied up in a bow like a grand piano on Christmas morning. They sneak in. They whisper.

Here are the three most surprising ways I discovered writing was my passion:

  1. A High School English Class Speeches Gone Wrong
    Picture me at 16, standing in front of a gaggle of classmates, delivering an assigned personal narrative like we were auditioning for the next Hallmark movie. I’d written something vaguely truthful but completely boring until a random, unfiltered thought escaped my mouth: “Honestly, I feel like Shakespeare would have ghosted this class entirely.”
    The room erupted. It wasn’t a well-planned joke, but it became this tiny spark—I realized if you can make someone laugh, you can hold their attention. I started experimenting in my essays with humor, sass, and observations that felt raw instead of safe. Did I sometimes go too far with sarcasm and get marked down? Absolutely. (Sorry, Mrs. Aldridge.) But I started writing because I realized people liked to listen when it sounded like me.

  2. Faith and Folly Growing up in my religious household meant I never ran out of material to write about—mostly because I was constantly trying to figure out the “rules” but accidentally smashing into them like a Roomba. One church event had seventeen-year-old Caleb volunteering to teach Sunday school to eleven-year-olds who clearly knew more about doctrine than I did. Predictably, midway through my wonky lesson about kindness, one kid asked, “Wait, so is it a sin to steal Wi-Fi?”
    The hilarity and humility of those moments—where I was both teacher and student—found their way into my early personal essays. I wrote about the tension of wanting to be good but also wanting to question why certain roads to goodness seemed unnecessarily paved with guilt trips. Faith gave me the material. Writing gave me the outlet.

  3. The Ugly Cry in Denver
    Fast forward to my grad school seminar on comparative religion. One day, I sat in a coffee shop—already clichéd, I know—going through some poorly constructed draft about morality and community when, bam: the floodgates opened. I ugly-cried. Loudly. (Sorry again to the Denver patrons of Beans & Brews.) The thing that broke me was rereading a sentence where I had, for the first time, written something completely, brutally honest about how lonely faith can feel when you believe in shared values but not in unanimous answers. I was crying because it felt real. That essay—those words—felt like the truest thing I’d ever put in the world. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.

How Passion Translates to Joy

Now, I want to be clear: passion doesn’t always mean joy. Sometimes passion is frustration. It’s deleting paragraphs, rewriting the same sentence 17 times, or staring at a laptop screen for hours in some kind of literary chicken-and-egg standoff. But under all of that is the thrill of knowing something inside you has this unique need to create—not for perfection, but for connection.

When it comes to dating—and bear with me—the same mechanics apply. Building relationships requires effort, vulnerability, and sometimes revisiting what you thought you’d figured out. What creates joy in a partnership isn’t just chasing easy, happy moments. It’s committing to the work of discovery: both of another person and yourself.

If you’re struggling to find your “thing” or doubting whether it brings you happiness, here are a few takeaways I’ve learned:

  • Start Small and Start Messy: The first time I experienced writing joy, it wasn’t some slam-dunk Pulitzer-worthy moment. It was an angsty kid doodling cartoons of backpacks.
  • Give Yourself Permission: The Denver coffee-shop cry? I think a lot about how I would’ve missed that breakthrough if I’d written what I thought my professor wanted versus what I actually believed. Don’t water yourself down for someone else’s approval.
  • Recognize the “Cheerleaders”: I still keep in touch with Mrs. Aldridge (despite all those sarcastic essays). Hundreds of teachers, mentors, and even random friends have been fuel in the tank. Let their encouragement remind you your joy might paint their world a little brighter too.
  • Joy Is in the Do-Over: No first draft—of a piece of writing or of love—is going to spill out flawless. Stick with it. Joy sets in when you surprise yourself and try again.

Rediscovering Joy in Everyday Moments

It’s one thing to discover joy in your calling once. It’s another to stick with it when the newness fades. Writing, like any relationship, stays alive when I allow myself to rediscover it each time I come back to the page.

I’ll tell you a secret: Some articles I write feel like slogging uphill with a grumpy backpack. But then there are the moments when just the right turn of phrase hums into existence, alive and undeniable, like that first burst of Wasatch air at the summit. And every single time, I’m reminded why this work matters. To me. To others.

So, if you’re still looking for that thing that lights you up—or if you’re working to keep it lit—remember this: you don’t need a perfect summit to start. You just need the next step. Maybe it’s a notebook. Or a pair of hiking shoes. Or, who knows, a coffee shop and a really good ugly cry. Whatever it is, trust that the joy is waiting for you to find it. And when you do, it’s magic.

And if it takes a grumpy backpack to get there? Well, even better.