Written by Alyssa Ostroff
The worst career advice I ever got was also the most common: follow your passion.
It sounds inspiring until you’re sitting in the wreckage of a job you didn’t choose to leave, realizing you don’t have a single clear “passion” waiting in the wings to follow. That was me in the spring of 2025. I’d just been laid off from my role as a senior graphic designer at the CDC. I had bills, a recently upended life, and no lightning bolt of purpose telling me what to do next. “Follow your passion” is useless advice when you’re not sure you have one — or when the one you have doesn’t obviously pay.
So I want to offer a different framing, one that’s served me far better and that I’d give anyone standing at a career crossroads: you don’t find your passion. You build it — usually from what you’ve already survived.
Passion is forged, not discovered
We talk about passion like it’s a hidden object, buried somewhere inside you, waiting to be excavated if you just do enough soul-searching. In my experience, that’s backwards. Passion is rarely a thing you discover fully formed. It’s a thing you assemble out of raw material you already have — your history, your frustrations, the problems you can’t stop noticing, the things you’ve lived through and understand from the inside.
When I was laid off, I didn’t go looking for my passion. I looked at what I already had: a design skillset and a lifetime of managing my own mental health. I live with Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, and autism, and over the years I’d started writing little reminders to myself to get through hard days — “you’re not in trouble, and no one is mad at you,” “rest is productive.” One month after the layoff, I started drawing those reminders and putting them on shirts. Not because a passion struck me, but because it was the intersection of what I could do and what I’d survived.
That intersection turned out to be the most meaningful work of my life. But I never would have found it by “searching for my passion.” I found it by asking a more useful question.
The three questions that actually work
If “follow your passion” is a dead end, here’s what I’d put in its place. When you’re figuring out what to pursue — especially after a setback — ask:
1. What have I survived that I understand from the inside? Your hardest experiences aren’t just wounds; they’re expertise. The thing you struggled with is a thing you now understand better than most people ever will. My mental health struggles felt like liabilities for years. They turned out to be the entire foundation of a business, because I could speak to my customers as one of them, not down to them. Look at your scars as credentials.
2. What do I keep caring about even when no one’s paying me to? Before I ever sold a single shirt, I was already drawing those reminders for myself. Passion often hides in the things you do unpaid, unprompted, almost compulsively. Those are clues. The unpaid version of the work is the honest version — it tells you what you’d do even if it were never a job.
3. What can I actually build with the skills I have right now? Passion without capability is just a daydream. The magic is in the overlap between what moves you and what you can competently make. I had design skills and lived experience; the business lived in the middle. Don’t wait to feel passionate before you build — build at the intersection, and the passion tends to grow from the building.
Setbacks are raw material, too
Here’s the part nobody tells you: a layoff, a rejection, a career you had to abandon — these aren’t just losses. They’re often the shove you needed toward work you’d never have chosen on your own. I would not have built anything meaningful if I hadn’t first lost the thing I thought was stable. The ending I didn’t want became the beginning I needed.
I’m not going to romanticize it — being laid off was frightening and genuinely hard, and I don’t recommend it as a growth strategy. But if you’re in that wreckage right now, I’d gently suggest it’s not empty. It’s raw material. The question isn’t “what was my passion all along?” It’s “what can I build from where I actually am, with what I actually have and have been through?”
That question has an answer for everyone. “Follow your passion” doesn’t.
Your passion isn’t lost. It probably hasn’t been built yet. So start assembling it — from your skills, your stubborn cares, and everything you’ve already survived. That’s not a consolation prize for people who didn’t find their calling. In my experience, it’s how callings actually get made.
Author Bio:
Alyssa Ostroff is the founder and designer of Self-Care Shirts, a mental health apparel brand she built after a layoff. She writes personal essays on mental health twice a week and lives with Tourette syndrome, narcolepsy, and autism.
