It’s not my thing, but…

Posted on 3 July, 2017

I don’t care what you love. I just care that you love it.

I spent a couple of hours last night with thousands of Minecraft enthusiasts at the Sydney Opera House. They were dressed up. They were  free-playing with virtual reality headsets. They were getting their bodies signed by famous Minecraft YouTubers. They were competing in Australia’s first ever Minecraft competition. It was Minecraft madness.

Then we came back to our hotel and watched The Voice, starring Canberra’s own Lucy Sugerman, who’d spent some of the afternoon snap-chatting my daughter, who she’s at school with, with pre-show snippets, including about my daughter’s crush, Niall Horan, who was also performing on the show. Excitingly, Lucy is to be one of the stars of the premiere performance of the musical adapted from my teen novel, Unrequited, to be performed at St Clare’s College this November. It was inspired by the aforementioned crush.

All around us is passion. Passion for Minecraft. Passion for music. Passion for pop stars. Passion for sport. Passion for cooking. Passion for animals, or reading, or writing, or acting, or anything else.

As I sat in the Opera House and looked around me, I saw the light in everyone’s eyes. Light that wasn’t in mine, because it’s not my thing, but gosh, I can appreciate how much they love their thing.

I don’t care what you love. I just care that you love it. Imagine if we all gave each other the freedom to love what we love, openly and wholeheartedly. Imagine if we owned our own passions, with the “I Don’t Care Who Sees Me” abandon of six-year-old Minecrafters.