Naturally it’s afraid that, in pursuing your dream, you might lose everything you’ve won.

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting. – The Alchemist

Dreams are fickle things.

I have both of these quotes on my wall at home because for so much of my life it seems like these statements are always relevant. They are immediately contradictory when taken concurrently, but for me, seem to always happen in direct sequence (haha construction scheduling speak. owned). I push, and I push to reach a dream and in obtaining it, I grasp it for a short while only to see that some of what I have worked to achieve has crumbled beneath me.

My life as I know it, and I can only imagine that this is true for most people, is an endless cycle of highs and lows. There are unfortunately – in my estimation – many more lows than there are highs, but overall I cannot say that I am unhappy with my life. This is due mostly to the fact that when I do experience a high, I am usually so fully immersed in that high that it makes up for all of the other things in my life that are bad.

I am being a lot more melodramatic than is strictly necessary here. Things are not going poorly for me. There is one specific thing that I wish was going differently so that it would more closely resemble my day dreaming.

I have always been fascinated by dreams and day dreaming. If day dreaming was a career path, I’d be a billionaire by now – I am just that good at it. I love the fantasy and the story telling aspects of it. I love the happy endings, the vindication and the vengeance that always seem so justified. My issue always seems to be that I try to force my life to fit into my day dreaming. That I create personality traits and imagined thought patterns for those around me in my head and then am surprised when they do not conform to what my dreams say. Maybe I have vilified someone significantly more than they deserve. Maybe they are not as kind, or generous or caring as I had thought. Maybe this other person isn’t as horrible as my thoughts make them out to be. Maybe they have some redeeming qualities that other people see that I don’t based purely on the fact that I have already decided how they are going to behave. This may be less dreaming and more judgement of character, but as all of these people play roles in my life, my perception of all of them is formed through my interactions and my reflections of their actions and more importantly, my desires for specific outcomes within these interactions.

It always surprises me how quickly I allow my desires or fears of specific outcomes cloud my judgement of other people and situations. How I will attribute intelligence and success to people I want to do business with. How I attribute kindness and generosity to those that I want to be friends with. How I attribute ignorance and undesirability to those I believe I am in competition with. How willing I am to assume judgement and slights in any interaction. And most relevant for now, how I attribute affection and yearning to those that I want to grow with.

 

Of Hope

To get the obvious out of the way before I continue pontificating about the relevance and importance of dreams, I am writing again because of a female – specifically, Elsa and our complicated relationship. Again, I know she may end up reading this, but that’s okay. I’m not saying anything that I haven’t already told her, or she hasn’t been smart enough to figure out. Also this is my space to open my mind and my heart and I need to do it. So this is happening now. [EDITOR’S NOTE: That was more a note to myself. Now is the time for me to continue my self-reflections and be selfish. Reflect on what what I need for me, and let all of the chips fall where they fall.] I had pretty high hopes for me and Elsa. I don’t think they’re going away any time soon, but they are quickly being pushed to the side. This is a perfect example how my heart never, ever does what my brain wants it to.

Intellectually, I have always known that I shouldn’t have pursued anything with her. I have always known it wasn’t the right time and that I needed to be patient. Emotionally, I couldn’t help myself. She is as close as you can get to the sum of all the amazing parts of all the girls that I’ve dated. We have never truly fought so I don’t know how she fights, but the couple tiffs we have had we were able to get through relatively easily. It became harder and harder to not want more the longer we hung out. I wanted her to want me, and I wanted her to be with me. Foolishly, I believed that if I dreamed hard enough I could end up in my own little fairy tale.

Needless to say, it’s not complicated with Elsa anymore. It’s not anything other than friendship now, and I can’t help but think that I screwed it up. That I wanted the dream to be true, and for a while I think it might have been true, but then it started slipping and so I pushed harder to get it back. Now, as Paulo Coelho wrote, in the unyielding pursuit of my dream, I have severely hampered my ability to achieve my dream and have potentially damaged what I had to start with. With my own insecurities and my own neediness, I think I have actually pushed her away from me. And really, I have no one to blame but myself. Maybe if I was stronger. If only I’d been able to hold true to my previous post about courtship. How nice it would be if we could just go back to that. That was so comfortable. It was so safe. Then I fucked it all up.

Again, with the melodrama. I want to believe so much that we can just go back to what we had before it got complicated. Who knows. I suppose all these things need is time.

I told her once that I have the ability to flip a switch on my emotions for someone, to completely cut them out. This is true. And I have done it. It takes a lot, but it can be done. I told her that there was really no coming back from it if I did it, and that’s not a lie either. What I didn’t tell her is that it involves convincing myself that the other person is beneath me, that it means I focus on all of the flaws and all of the pain that they have caused me and eventually it hurts so much that I need to cut it off. By then it is way too late to have any sort of relationship, friendship or anything else. It makes everything stop hurting. I have done this a number of times, and I can’t say that I’ve regretted doing it, but at the same time who knows, because how can you regret doing something to someone who you don’t give a fuck about?

With her, I don’t think I could ever do it – mostly because she’s never brought anything to my life but joy. She’s never done anything that’s upset me. She asked me to treat her like one of the guys, and asked me whether or not I could accept being just friends with the risk that there really could be nothing else. How do you answer something like that? I will never be able to treat her like “one of the guys”. And of course I can accept the risk of being just friends, because what other options are there? She fits into my life way too well for me to cut her out of it. But where does that really leave me? I suppose that leaves me with a quiet yearning that I’ll just have to find a way to deal with. It leaves me with the fact that I need to be strong enough, arguably for both of our sakes, to not pursue these feelings anymore – for the sake of her ability to heal, and for the sake of my ability to keep her in my life.

FUCK, the melodrama.

In reality, this is probably not anywhere near as bad as it is in my head. We still get along fantastically and I (we, hopefully) still want to do all of the things together. There is a little bit of weirdness now, but I can attribute most of that to me making her feel weird by having a hard time accepting that we’re just friends now. I can only imagine that will go away with time as I become more accustomed to the new relationship and when my yearning for more dies down to a dull simmer.

Last note about Elsa – I suppose that the most painful thing that’s left for me is the hope that in time, or whatever, there can still be more. That she will work through what she needs to work through and will want to pursue this again.

I was trying to be depressing again and find that quote about how the worst thing you can give someone who is dying or being tortured is the hope that they can survive, but then I came across all of these fantastic quotes on how wonderful hope can be.

Hope is the thing with feathers // That perches in the soul // And sings the tune without the words // And never stops at all. – Emily Dickinson

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. – Martin Luther King Jr.

So maybe I won’t give up hope because what’s the point of that? So fuck what I just said. I believe that what we have is amazing, and it can still be amazing. I believe in hope, no matter how much it hurts, or how long I have to hope for. Maybe that makes me naive, but I chose to believe in the power of hope, and that’s not anything I care to change about myself.

Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. – Stephen King

So maybe the dream isn’t gone – maybe I’ll just need to stay awake for a little bit.

 

Of Dreams

My belief in dreams and my belief in day dreaming really stems from the fact that (no matter how pseudo-science it is) I honestly believe that there is some sort of connection between people that appears through dreams and sub-conscious thought. Yes, yes, I know I sound crazy. On next blog’s episode I’ll start telling you why you should all have religion! There are a startling number of events in my life that I swear I had pictured before via a day-dream or sleeping dream. There are a number of times I knew something was wrong with someone else because of a dream. Maybe it can all just be dismissed as deja-vu, but some of them are relatively inexplicable.

Like the time I texted a friend I hadn’t spoken to in years because I had a super disturbing dream about her in a lot of pain, and it turns out she was going through a super rough time in her life. Or the recurring dream I had about my father every night for years during my childhood that ended up being prophetic. Or when I dreamt that I got accepted to Cornell before I knew I wanted to go get my Masters and so I applied and got in.

Maybe I’m a precognitive! I could be an X-man!

I looked it up just now. Turns out I’m probably not precognitive. It’s very quantum physics which means its either super made up, or I’ll just never be smart enough to understand it which is basically the same thing.

Either way, I believe in the power of dreams, not only as aspirations, but as indicators for the future. Most of them don’t come true, like when I day dream about winning the lottery… although, every time I’ve said to myself “someone is going to win the lottery on the next draw” it has happened… MAYBE I NEED TO RETHINK THIS.

I’m running out of steam, so I’ll end with this, my NY Epiphany #6:

I believe in daring to trust your dreams,

I believe that dreams come with costs and sacrifice,

But I believe in pushing to achieve them.

Above everything else, I believe that dreams breed hope, and hope – in the words of Stephen King – may just be the best of things.

Wait no, I’ll end with this:

You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.