on dreams and learning to live

"I want to learn how I want to live." 

It comes from a conversation with a friend in my last year of college—this idea's been stuck in my head for the year or so since then. 

In a broad sense, I'm an adult. In a broad sense, I know what I'm doing. In a broad sense, I'm going in some sort of direction, toward some sort of destination. What exactly the destination is, I'm not sure—but circumstance has set me on a course, and following it has felt easy enough. 

But things have changed this past year. As this place—as the circumstances I've accepted as "reality" have grown less and less sustainable for my long-term existence, maybe it's time I question where the hell this path is taking me.

What are Dreams?

Since I was in elementary school, teachers and movies and motivational speakers have told me to chase my dreams. So much so that I got kind of sick of it. My life has been a series of simple goals. Get good grades. Get into a good school. Do well. Graduate. Get a good job. And so on. 

Along that path, "dreams" to me were a fanciful idea that ignored the reality I lived in. Arbitrary hallucinations in my sleep, quickly forgotten when I returned to the real world. As they should be—there are things to be done, deadlines to meet, obligations to keep. And this has remained the case.

But all these years, "what actually is a dream?" is something I've neglected to ask myself. Not the hallucinations in your sleep, not the silly ideals I was taught as a kid, but the very-real very-tangible very-important part of the human experience.

The definition I reached like 10 seconds ago is that dreams are the parts of me—the things I want, the things I care about, the things that would make me happy—that are incompatible with the "real world". 

They are the things I value that the world does not. They are the things only I can fight for. And if I don't keep them alive—or first, importantly, figure out what the hell they are—they will gradually disappear. 

To learn those dreams, to learn "how I want to live" is not intuitive. It's not part of any school curriculum. Maybe cause my happiness provides no tangible benefit to "advancing society" or any external interest. This is my fight—so it's on me to set the terms.

Getting Lost in the Noise

One thing I learned from 4 years of drowning in college work is that having a linear to-do list is unsustainable. The mindset I was taught—finish work first, do my own stuff later—is a straight path to eternal misery.

Because the to-do list never ends. And if you close your eyes and let the river of "I should"s sweep you along the entire course of your life, it will be all too happy to oblige. You need some mechanism that lets you put your thumb on the scale—to say "no, actually I want to do this right now."

And to the point of actually knowing what you want, it's kind of a learned skill. It's become almost second nature for me to give answers like "anything is fine" or "whatever you want." But as much as it gets drowned out by the noise from the external-obligation-misery-river, I think the voice is still there. The one in my head that can tell me that even if "anything is fine", maybe there's one thing that would make me just a tiny bit happier. I've been trying to listen to it more, and I might be imagining it, but it seems a tiny bit louder now 

There is no room for dreams. No room for the things that we as individuals care about. So we need to make that room, to forcibly shove everything out of the way. To manifest as much of our imaginary worlds as we can into the cold space of reality, and pray it's enough to stop us from freezing to death. 

Ok, this is sounding a bit too motivational-speaker-ey. Let's move on.

Dreams are Hard

Having a late-night conversation a former classmate about the highly volatile trajectories of our lives in the current world, he told me about a friend who wanted to pursue music. She had started a band and made it big, doing shows and gaining fans, gathering momentum along the path she had chosen. 

It took her over 20 years till any of that started. 

Twenty. Years. I don't think words can ever do justice to two full decades of trying and failing. Decades of unmet expectations. Decades of getting back up despite that cruel statistic lingering over her head: that there is no hard pity in real life. No hidden meter counting down to your inevitable success. No guarantee that you will ever make it. 

I've been thinking about that a lot. Far from that romanticized journey, chasing your dreams is hard. It's borderline insane. Dreams aren't big things—these pleasant, rosy-colored clouds peeking up over the horizon. They're very small. The tiniest possibility, An infinitesimal window into another world. An often painful reminder that just out of reach, a world away, you could be happier. And it terrifies me a bit. Because I don't know if I have what it takes to survive a journey like that.

Depending on personal circumstances, following that possibility may neither be the "right" choice nor even a "reasonable" choice. For some, the sacrifice—of stability and safety—is too great. For others, things may just never work out. And there's also those stories—of people who make it, but end up losing their passion once it becomes their work. Terrifying. 

But there's only one way to know if that's the case, and I think I owe it to myself to give it at least one good try. 

But How?

I've decided that I can't live without amount of thingmaking: of writing, drawing, composing, whatever. And as much as I've somewhat internalized my parents' well-intentioned advice to keep those as hobbies, the voice in my head saying "but what if, for once, you prioritized the things you care about," has been hard to silence.

It's got a point. I've spent my life following the instructions set in front of me, convinced that nothing else exists. I learned to erase my dreams before I learned how to dream them. And to just say goodbye to them; leave behind a part of myself without ever seeing its face—I don't know if I can accept that and move on. 

So. Let's say I listen to that voice. What do I do? There's no fork in the road with a convenient "dreams this way" label. But there's certainly footprints in the grass—desire paths from others who have strayed from the road. As long as I start walking, maybe I'll get somewhere. And maybe one of those somewheres will be somewhere I want to be.

All that's left is that whole "starting" thing. Which is weird. Cause "chasing dreams" evokes this all-or-nothing quest for some grand purpose, which if anything, hurt me more than it helped. It creates more external pressure, and god knows we have enough of that. Since on the course you chart, only you decide what all this means: slogging through the noise, and piecing together what was once there—where you're headed, how you'll get there, and what it means to start.

What does all this mean? Hell if I know. It's a process. And, well—I'll see how it goes.