The Realities Of Chasing Your Dreams

I think one of the strangest things about deciding to follow my dreams is that people actually believe in me. Like, people actually see me as a writer. I know that might sound a little dumb coming from someone who has a fully published website/blog full of their written work and multiple years of experience as a professional copywriter under their belt, but for most of my life (and still sometimes to this day) I have been plagued with imposter syndrome so severe that it almost kept me from writing anything at all.

I’ve known that I wanted to write since I was very, very young. I taught myself to read when I was only 3, stealing my older sisters “Hooked on Phonic’s” books and hiding them under my bed so I could practice in secrecy. Once I started reading, I never stopped. And once I realized I couldn’t stop, I realized that I wanted to write things that made other people feel the same way. I have plenty of old notebooks full of book ideas, half finished chapters, and some very interesting short stories. They definitely aren’t perfect, or even particularly good, but they are evidence of a childhood spent dreaming of writing stories, dreaming of what it would be like to have other people read and actually enjoy things that I had written.

I’m not quite sure when the shift happened - from childhood daydream to something that felt too personal to share, but by the time I was deciding what to do with my life, pursuing my passion for writing wasn’t even something I considered.

Somewhere along the path to adulthood, I had been taught or assumed or somehow came to the conclusion that I could never be a writer, at least not for my career. I was convinced that the people who told me I was a good writer were just humoring me, because there was no way I had the talent to do this for real. I’d get embarrassed when my friends would bring it up, certain that they were just being kind and that anyone else would scoff at the idea of me being a writer.

And yet they never did. It was always my own brain doing the scoffing, my own brain being the one to tell me that I couldn’t hack it, that I didn’t have what it took. That I would have to settle for a career in something like marketing or business or whatever else in order to support myself, and using the notion that at least I could do a little writing, even if it wasn’t in the way that I wanted, to console myself. I tried telling myself that it would be enough to satiate my apparent need to write, but here I am 5 years later knowing that it never was, nor would it ever be.

I tried forcing myself into a traditional career path and life because it was safer, less scary. It was easier to go along with what was expected of me, and what’s expected of most people really - to go to college, do the internships, get the full time job, find fulfillment in your career. I excelled in my job, and I blamed myself for feeling so miserable while doing it. Because how could I be so depressed, how could I hate something so much when I was good at it? When it was everything that I was “supposed” to be doing?

It took me a while, but I slowly started realizing that if I were actually following my dreams, it would not make me feel so awful. It would not fill me with dread at the thought of continuing down that path, of a future that I had no interest in but felt trapped into pursuing.

Instead of blaming myself for hating what I thought I should love, I started realizing that the problem was not with me, or that I was ungrateful for the opportunity, or that I just needed to get used to being an adult. The problem was that this was never the way in which I was meant to live my life.

It took a bunch of poor choices, one really shitty job and several years of being extremely unhappy, but I finally came to the realization that my life was always meant to be a little unconventional. Yes, I want to write and work and do something meaningful to make money. But I also dream of traveling the world and eating good food and meeting as many interesting people as possible. Of doing whatever I want, whenever I want and worrying only about where the world might take me next. I’ve always gotten bored easily, and I’ve always loved the idea of a challenge. The excitement and freedom and adventure of a life lived on my own terms was and is too enticing to pass up.

But in order to choose this life for myself, I had to reckon with two things.

The first - the crippling guilt I felt in choosing to pursue a different path. Like I had somehow squandered all of the opportunities I’d had previously because I was making a change, that I had wasted them and taken them from other people who were somehow more deserving. I was convinced that by choosing to write, I was turning my nose up at the varying professional experiences I had had over the past 5 years - jobs, internships, classes, you name it. As though all the time I spent learning about and working in marketing would mean nothing if I chose to do something else (as though what I’m doing now is not hugely related to marketing, and ties in with all the lessons I learned from my past experiences).

The funny thing about guilt though, is that it’s simply not as scary when you address it head on. In taking a step back, I realized that the guilt I felt wasn’t even rational - I had no reason to feel bad about doing what was best for me. Just because I decided to make a change does not mean I wasted other people’s time or my own, and it certainly didn’t take away from the things I learned from these experiences. I was made to feel guilty by my own brain and by people who had their own selfish agenda’s, but it didn’t last. I knew it wasn’t my responsibility to manage other people’s feelings, or to refuse to chase my own happiness just to placate people who were too afraid to go after their own.

And while this was a major breakthrough, I still had to work through one more thing before I made the decision to dive in head first - my own fear of the unknown.

I was terrified, and justifiably so. It’s scary to do something different, to have a totally new plan that looks nothing like the one you were following your entire life before-hand. Not knowing where your next paycheck is coming from, not knowing if you’ll be able to succeed and even do what it is that you want to do.

I was terrified of letting people in, letting people see that I wanted something so badly, letting them read the thoughts I would typically relegate to the pages of my journal, all the while not knowing if I would ever be able to achieve anything at all. I was terrified of having to give up and go crawling back to the windowless offices of corporate America. And I’m still a little scared of that, to be honest, but every time I thought about how scared I was, I also thought about how good life would be if I could do it. How amazing and fulfilling and incredible it would be to create a life entirely on my own terms.

I thought about what I would do with my life if money didn’t matter, if I didn’t have to work to live, if I had made different choices. And every time, my brain came back to the same thought - if I knew I couldn’t fail, I would write. If money didn’t matter, I would write. If I could go back and choose, I would choose to write. Just because I was afraid didn’t mean I couldn’t do it.

I didn’t have to wait to get over my fears to try; I could be scared and try to do it anyway.

And not to worry, I’m still very much terrified. I still have no idea how to get from here to where I want to be, or if I’ll ever get there at all or even if where I think I want to be is actually where I want to be, ya know? I still feel like a fraud every time someone asks me what I do for work and I tell them I’m a writer - like it’s wishful thinking and not a fact. I still deal with bouts of guilt, and have to remind myself that I am no longer surrounded by people who make me feel guilty for doing what’s best for me - it’s their voices, not mine, in my head still telling me that I should feel bad about being happy because I did not do it their way.

Chasing your dreams, no matter how idyllic the phrase sounds on paper, is often messy and scary and really, really hard. It’s a lot of tears and panic and self-doubt, but also pushing through all of that knowing that the end result will be worth it. Knowing that even if you don’t make it to where you want to go, at least you actually tried. That even if you don’t make it, it’s very possible you end up somewhere even better in the process.