Column: Keep chasing the dream, feed your passion

Persistence. That's the difference between life's winners and its losers.

Winners don't quit, and quitters don't win. It's as simple as that.

One will never accomplish goals in life or realize dreams if one gives up the chase. I've had to learn some hard lessons about that over the years.

I'm a mid-career professional approaching middle age. While others my age are halfway through their careers en route to retirement, I have struggled to find myself and rediscover the passion deep inside that stirs my soul.

Finally, after two decades of putting my dreams on the shelf and allowing circumstances to dictate the terms, I am now wrestling back control of my life's course from the world around me.

My epiphany did not arrive without a price. I've ridden a roller coaster of health and emotions along the way.

But I found my passion, the fire that lights me up inside, and starting Aug. 21, 2018, I begin the first big step in a journey toward achieving a lifelong pursuit.

That's the day I set foot back onto a college campus as a student for the first time in 20 years.

I'm going back to school to earn a master's degree in teaching special education, and obtain a K-12 special education teaching license.

I will amass student loan debt — something I managed to avoid in earning my bachelor's degree — so I'm a bit intimidated by the prospect of owing Uncle Sam more than just taxes; especially drawing a teacher's salary for the next couple of decades.

But I've wanted to become a teacher since I was in middle school. The seed was planted by my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Kodera, and later cultivated by her husband, Mr. Kodera, when I was in seventh grade. He recruited me to serve in a new peer counseling program, and from that day forward, a passion for helping others took its root.

Looking back on my early life, I find it odd that a 13 year-old boy dreamed of one day becoming a classroom teacher; not an astronaut or architect, not a rock star, celebrity or intrepid, adventuring archeologist.

I wanted to be a teacher, the very people who many of my peers tended to avoid and among the last shown due respect to.

I didn't know at the time where that desire came from within me. I just knew it was there.

I had previously enrolled in a teacher preparation program two decades ago upon earning my undergraduate degree. But I quit shortly after beginning the first term. I was failing a new "creative math" class, the first course in the program.

I didn't understand the concepts, no matter how hard I tried. So, I withdrew before a failing grade could be tattooed on my academic record, and I decided to give up my dream.

Instead, I pursued a career in print journalism, where I've been, on and off, ever since.

I was accepted into the University of Nevada, Reno, College of Education a few years afterward. But its class schedule didn't fit with my work schedule; so once again, I put my dream on the shelf and continued to ply the media trade.

Don't get me wrong: I genuinely enjoy writing — especially about people — and I have discovered both a knack and a love for it. But the news itself doesn't light that fire within, or ignite a passion inside of me.

The past few years of my life have been about self-discovery; finding things about me that I liked and embracing those, as well as finding things about me that I didn't like and seeking to change them.

One thing I didn't like about me was that I tended to hide from failure. I avoided it like the Plague because, to me, it was. Failure grew into a bona fide fear that held me within its grip.

For a long time, I felt a lot like Charlie Brown, the round-headed creation of cartoonist Charles Schulz who seemed to fail at just about everything he tried. He couldn't even trick-or-treat right on Halloween without getting a bag full of rocks or select a Christmas tree without it falling over.

But Chuck, fictional as he is, proved a better person than me. No matter how many times Lucy pulled the football away from him at the last possible moment, he kept coming back and trying again.

No matter how many hitters knocked his shoes and socks off with line drives, Charlie Brown kept coming back for more.

Charlie Brown is persistent, and that's why he is beloved by so many adoring Peanuts fans.

If I was going to conquer my fear of failure, I had to become persistent like good, ol' Chuck.

At the same time that I began my journey of self-discovery, I was also dealing with an unknown neurological problem that still has no definitive clinical diagnosis. I was a medical anomaly then — and still am — which didn't help at all with my fear of failure.

At the lowest and darkest point in my life, I was burdened with a disabling condition and unemployed, having lost a job I had held for eight years, but could no longer perform.

Desperate for work — any work I could do — I decided to obtain a Nevada K-12 substitute teaching license, because even an on-call job was better than none at all.

I was nervous when I got the call for my first sub assignment; but as soon as I returned home that day, my loved ones said at the time there was a light in my eyes they'd not seen before.

I felt kind of like Charles Dickens' character, Ebenezer Scrooge, after he awoke Christmas morning to find he hadn't missed the holiday after all. It was a sense of joy like nothing else I'd ever experienced before.

I imagine the feeling was much like the one Daniel Eugene "Rudy" Ruettiger experienced stepping onto the University of Notre Dame campus for the very first time as a student back in the 1970s.

Rudy was still a long way from achieving his dream, but he was much closer than he had ever been before.

That's when Rudy really began to put his passion for playing football at Notre Dame into overdrive. Rudy proved to be more than persistent. He was downright tenacious, and he earned the respect of the entire Irish football team en route to suiting up for the season's final game in his last year of player eligibility.

Entering the classroom as a teacher — albeit a substitute — for the very first time just felt right to me. Like Rudy in football pads, I was in my element.

Time passed, though, and the need for more substantive employment superseded my desire to keep subbing. I was eventually hired as a news reporter here in Carson City; a job I remain grateful for, because it was offered to me when I needed it the most.

But something deep inside of me still yearned to be released: The teacher within me wanted out once and for all.

This time around, I will not give up because of one class.

This time, I won't let circumstances drive a wedge between me and my passion.

This time, I will keep up the pursuit, chasing a resurrected childhood dream that I had left for dead.

Some people are artists, others are legal eagles. Some are doctors or nurses; others are entrepreneurs, journeymen in their trades, scientists, engineers, restaurateurs, first responders, entertainers or journalists.

If that's your passion, your love, then God bless you.

I'm a teacher in my heart and in my soul.

I encourage you to find what lights the fire inside of you, the passion that ignites the burning flame of your human spirit.

And even if the journey takes a lifetime, never stop pursuing your happiness, because dreams only die when we stop chasing them.

Believe me, I know.