Growing up in Florida, I wanted to be a veterinarian. I used to catch critters everywhere and felt it was my duty to protect the little guys. I especially loved the toads and lizards. The weight of their little bodies felt safe in my hands. I wanted to spend my days caring for them. Then, around 5th grade, my parents informed me that caring for animals also required putting some of them down. Puppies included. Animal care went out the window. I do not do corpses.

Then, in middle school, I thought maybe I wanted to be a performer. No corpses on a stage. I loved singing and dancing and thought, “Surely, I am dramatic enough to make these passions a career”. I was wrong. I pursued those passions in high school and all I got out of it was debilitating performance anxiety. I was surrounded by wealthier kids, and therefore, more talented kids. They could afford voice and dance lessons before big auditions while I stood in my bathroom whisper-singing at 9 pm because I had just finished a shift at my after-school job and my grandma was trying to sleep. Every audition crushed me. Performance went out the window.

This led me to a new passion. Humans. The struggling ones, like I was. I served as president of our school’s Gay Straight Alliance during my senior year and, although I was perhaps not the best student, I truly cared about our little club. I cared about safety and security for my friends. I cared about the stories they were shamed into keeping secret. So, I decided I wanted to work as a journalist. I wanted to find stories that the world needed to hear. I went off to Sacramento and studied Government and Journalism in college… for a year. Then, journalism went out the window.

I loved the theory courses, but modern discussions felt too heated. Too involved. Too lacking in the nuance department. You either hate this politician or you love them. This policy either blows or it will save America. There was no room for “but” and you always needed to have an opinion. Life is simply not so. After a year of bad debates, I sought nuance elsewhere and found it in creative writing, where I still find purpose to this day.

Herein lies The Coffee Shop Problem. Imagine you’re walking down the street in the dead of winter. You’re bundled up, fighting to stay warm when you see someone drinking a hot coffee and you think, “God, that sounds amazing right now”. So you dip into a coffee shop to get a hot drink and after two minutes, you’re sweating like a puppy at a kill shelter. Coffee shops are always too warm in the winter, often to the point of dizziness. So you stand in line and strip yourself of your coat, your hat, your gloves, only to continue fanning your neck in the sauna of milk steam. Then, you get to the front of the line, wipe the sweat off your brow, and say, “Can I just get an iced coffee, please?”. Hot coffee goes out the window. 

That is The Coffee Shop Problem. When, in the process of getting the thing you want, you realize you no longer want it. The pursuit changes you, causing your new self to desire something different. Something cooler.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this in your own life. You want one job, relationship, etc. which requires some work, but by doing that work, you find what you don’t like about it. Then, if you’re lucky, you find a different job that does not require you to do that begrudging work, but a new aversion pops up, and so on. You want to be a vet, but vets deal with death, so you pivot to performing, which is full of life, but performance is often elitist, so you pivot to civic journalism, but the state of journalism lacks nuance, so you land on writing nuanced stories. From vet to writer and all it took was twenty years of ordering iced lattes. Twenty years of running inside to get what I want, only to find that the heat of my passions was actually forging new ones of which I could have never dreamed. Our pursuits change our destinations. All you have to do is keep walking inside.

Written by Patty Castellanos