#19 Take care of your dreams
about painting the sky an impossible color
I initially wanted to write this a few days ago, somewhere around midnight in a manic-fueled couple of hours where I felt inspired and what have you, very very alive and wired. But then I decided I should go to sleep and leave it for later, specifically the Tuesday meetups with Sofia, where we spend a solid half-hour catching up, followed by about an hour of writing. So, here we are today —and gone is the dreamy inspiration— replaced by the drab and drag of frustrations with myself, mainly wondering what I should be filling my slower days with now that it's been (roughly) five months of very little work.
I think about how “in me, there are two wolves”: the 7-figure self-made girlboss and the somewhat low-income, inspired, and free-spirited artist (more specifically, writer). I think about the earliest dream I have for myself and how it has become a bit diluted by the endless stream of girlboss dreams on LinkedIn, post after post about running a marketing agency remotely, or growing a 1-person business into a 5-, 10-person team. I read about the tech bros who give you advice to make engaging content and play the algorithm to reach more audiences and generate leads in your sleep. Content as a profit machine.
Then I think about the weeks coming up: how I will spend most of June in London, by myself; a stroke of divine intervention when, earlier this year, I began thinking of resuming the Annual Solo Trips I began sometime in 2017 and paused indefinitely due to pandemic-induced isolation. Followed by a timely call from Bea, who offered her apartment in London for three weeks in exchange for taking care of her plants and keeping the place clean. Then the plan was in motion: I got my visa sorted and bought a train ticket a few days later, all within a few weeks.
Within the context of grief I haven't been feeling like the most celebratory person in the world, or like planning a holiday at all, so I feel happy past me took the time to take the opportunity and seize the entirety of London in all its June glory. I haven't been there since I was fifteen for only 3 days, and all I remember is how busy it was in front of some royal building(?) and buying a sweater that said “Oxford” on it. And the Hard Rock Café we had lunch at. Oh, and a man puking into a trashcan in broad daylight as we drove by in the bus, only to keep walking down the street. Suffice it to say, if you have London tips - please drop them. I think that beast is going to be an interesting one to meet at 26.
Mostly I’ve been thinking about how to dream is another way to live. To quote Olivia Laing, We should go on living, dreaming all the time. I recently dreamt about when I was around 9 years old and in my school before the school I ended up graduating from, entering my short story in a contest, and winning second place. I remember thinking how good it felt to hear that something I made was noticeable, worth sharing, worth reading.
I understand now that it was the feeling of being understood that I loved most, not the fact that I didn’t win first place. The joy of being seen eclipsed whatever disappointment there might’ve been in not having won first place. The happiness of being understood was something I felt most when I wrote and shared it, without having to explain myself, without having to speak about the words, but just allowing them to be there, sitting snugly between me and the reader.
I haven’t taken the time to talk to that little girl and her dreams in a while. I jump forward in time, to when I am 22 - my therapist tells me to find a point in my hand, press it, imagine one of my dreams, imagine myself living them. I conjure up a Barnes & Noble (or a similar bookstore, just a warm-looking one), where I sit at a table, signing copies of my book. It’s a book that sells well enough that people would like a signed copy, apparently. This much is evident. I conjure the same vision when I go pick up a sticker that is placed on my passport a few years later, at 25, waiting to hear whether I can stay in the Netherlands and work on my own. As a writer, amongst other things. I didn’t imagine myself as a 7-figure self-made girlboss, so it makes me laugh to think that I should imagine myself that way now. Still, it’s become obvious to me that I’ve started to think my dreams are unrealistic or even worse —that horrible, practical, boring adult word— unreasonable. I think it’s such a pretentious and arrogant word, I really do. Who’s to really say something is unreasonable? Beyond the usual scenarios where it’s applicable, adults use it too liberally for things that in reality aren’t unreasonable, they’re just maybe more difficult to get or less typical to want, and for the fear of not getting it, it’s better to just not want it at all. Disguise it as something unrealistic or far-fetched, or well, unreasonable. I use this word too, and it's started to stick too closely to my dreams.
I’ve also been reading a lot of Ask Polly - her free columns especially, while I decide whether to get a paid subscription or not. Then I stumbled on her advice to a middle-aged writer who asks her, “Should I just give up on my writing?”
If you don’t have time to read her answer, this in particular stuck out to me:
Your job is to learn how to love the work of writing, and the work of aging, and the work of being alive. It’s all work, but it’s sublime. There are no shortcuts. That’s what’s great about it, in fact. You have to show up for it completely. You have to surrender yourself to the project of slowing down, focusing, meditating almost, until you manage to make something that leaps off the page, straight into the arms of a stranger.
In my case, you can clearly see where this is a bit on the nose. But in your case, I think replacing “the work of writing” with the work of anything it is that you love or dream about, should do the trick. Making things, especially in the creative industry (but I’d nowadays argue in any industry) is a bit of a disembowelment. It’s hard, maybe a little impossible, to separate ourselves from the things we do. If we work every day, well, some of that is going to seep into who we are or how we position ourselves in the world, what place we take in it, how we move within it.
I’m at a point in this part of my life where I’m thinking about this a lot more because I have nothing but time. Most days I’m able to sleep in a little more because I’m not needed elsewhere. I have one call a week with a client, if at that, and the rest of my 12 to maybe 16 hours of work at the moment is done in silence. So a lot of my free time has gone to thinking of my purpose and what kinds of things I could be doing, savoring this chapter of relative calm, relative un-busyness compared to the past two years.
So I arrive at dreams and that 10-year-old me, who wrote stories in silence at her desk or at home, who later wrote songs and showed them to her teacher after school, who kept a daily journal for her English teacher at 14, who later enrolled in advanced writing classes at 17 and kept writing at 18, submitting her work to media programs and writing courses, who thought that publishing her work one day was the pinnacle of the dream, the best version of her reality.
Now I am 26 and I think about how to find that girl again, if I have enough material in my brain or even enough talent to write something as gargantuan as a book. I walk through the halls of Donner and the “Book-Tok made me do it” section, filled with rom-com books and friends-to-lovers tropes, and poke fun at them with Honey, saying if these get published, my work one day for sure will. (This isn’t to say this is terrible work, it’s to say that there is something out there for everyone. Someone will surely enjoy what I write, or think about it, or want to read it at all. The world isn’t only interested in one thing. There are as many books as people at this point, if not soon).
It makes me a little sad to realize that I didn’t think of these practicalities when I was a kid who only loved to write: whether she was talented enough or good enough never crossed her mind —not in the way that she was blindly arrogant— but in the way that she believed she could one day do it. I also think I should get off the internet (more specifically LinkedIn), because even when my heart tries to be in the right place and create #content, it’s increasingly hard to ignore the 7-figure girlbosses and the tech bros, regurgitating the same 5 points ad-nauseam. I don’t see myself in them, and I don’t have the ambition to make a space for myself full of people I can’t relate to. Maybe I can look for them, call to them, but what do I have to say (or write?) does it matter?
I had a call with my coach yesterday, not for a session but for her market research. I signed up thinking this is the least I could do — after a couple of years of helping me, maybe I could help her, too. She opened Pandora’s box (she usually does), so I shouldn’t have been too surprised, but I was. What version of me is needed to succeed at what I want to succeed? Am I her now? What would a version of me who’s confident and empowered do to achieve it?
All these questions get tangled up with my questions about my dreams. How I’ve been taking care of them selectively when I sit down to write these essays, when I write things on my phone so I can pick them up later, untangle thoughts and images, and make them into something for you to read (that is equally if not more enjoyable for me to write). I do these things because I love to do them. I don’t have a hidden agenda or a personal branding goal. I’ve started to think I need to, otherwise I won’t succeed doing what I love.
I feel disingenuous, forced, a caricature of myself most of the time I scroll on LinkedIn. It’s sticky and weird, the feeling I get, except when I write something myself. Then the weird feeling of not relating to anyone comes, because not many people are “reacting” to it. It’s fucking weird, it makes me hyperaware of every sentence I write (which I usually am not), and it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating to make things and watch them stumble and flop, not land gracefully at all.
I’ve been neglecting my dreams. I’ve been doing it for the sake of not having to think about them or want them so much. And also because I can’t be unreasonable. And I used to hate that word! I’m becoming a little bit of one of my biggest fears! BORING! FEARFUL! REPETITIVE!
Then, well-timed saving grace arrives in the form of one Ask Polly column from November 2021 as I scroll through her free posts:
We are old nobodies who love what we do. We would be old nobodies even if Oprah and the New York Times best-seller list consecrated us, because we don’t want to create illusions around ourselves like so many others have done before. Instead, we make what we love and dress how we like and dance in our kitchens and breathe in the good moments because we know nothing lasts that long. We will never have everything we ever wanted. The world will not turn shiny and spotless and perfect one day. We aren’t rushing to some imaginary finish line. We are inching along slowly, smelling the flowers, playing with our dogs and cats, giving generously to those who need our help when we can.
I am a nobody who loves what she does. I haven’t accumulated enough life yet to feel like I can fill out a 300-page novel, or feel creative enough to create immersive worlds filled with adventure and sparkle and awe. I’m also not at my memoir level yet for the same reasons; but, in real life, I look at the Oprah features of the world, the women running multi-million dollar businesses, the sky tainted an impossible color.
I think about all the ways I have yet to grow.
But tending to my dreams, thinking of how they are another way to live, thinking of how dreams don’t care about goals and milestones and content and likability, profit and expansion; they are that sky tainted an impossible color. It makes me feel purposeful. Makes me feel like I’m doing this right.
Your dream, whatever it is, is the sky, an impossible color. Look up. Hold it. Take it with you, wherever you go.