Dreamer(s): An Outrageous Departure

Somewhere along the way, I must’ve forgotten how to dream. As a girl, I had an extremely active imagination. In the trailer on a pear orchard that I lived in with my parents for my toddler-dom, and during the time before my sister was born, I kept many imaginary friends. A blank space on the wall was, to me, the front door to the house of my best friends, Ash, Misty, and Brock. They’d open the door to greet me, Pikachu behind them chirping, “Pika!” to welcome me into their world where we’d have many great adventures and catch all of the coolest and most beautiful Pokemon.

So too was the seemingly giant stone porcupine doorstop, who permanently held open our dusty screen door, a fast friend of mine. He didn’t have a name, but he’d tell me comings and goings outside that day, keeping me apprised of the weather and the clouds and the wind. He’d invite me to lift him up, big as he was, to check his underside for rolly pollies. The trees behind our home would whisper to me about whether or not any given pear might be ready for me to sneakily pluck it off of a branch to snack on. A stream of bubbles I blew from a wand would paint a million pictures just for me to enjoy as I darted my eyes around to quickly look through each and every one of them, their rainbow-soapy sheen offering a shimmery lens for me to see the landscape through.

This feeling didn’t disappear overnight, no. As a teenager, too, with a job and responsibilities and a dying mother, I still found time to daydream; about art, and whetherI had time to make some; about fashion, and if I could conjure up a new combination of clothes in my closet to make something new and outrageous and fun; about music, and who was playing at the next open mic night at the coffee house, what concert could I go to next, and what song I could sing in the car later.

But after many long, droning, and difficult years of growing up in unstable situations, I found myself an adult with a big, terrible job, an apartment and bills, and no room left for dreams. That’s what I thought, anyway. Looking back, I had plenty of time to dream, but it was too painful. Somewhere along the way I learned, or maybe was explicitly taught, that dreams are just that; fanciful, meant to stay in your head, definitely never to be realized. What could make me so special to deserve to do what I wanted to do with my life? That’s not realistic. No one gets to do that.

So I stuffed my dreams down into the depths of my mind, as far as I could, drowning them out with as much drugs and alcohol as I could muster. I threw myself at a string of jobs and people that didn’t give a rat’s ass about me. I filled my time with anything I could to numb myself of the feeling of losing me.

My biggest cheerleader was missing too; the only person who might’ve conceivably been able to pull me out of my stupor. My mom, who had passed away by the time I was out on my own and carving my path in life, was my biggest supporter in all things creative, especially near the end of her life, as she was just starting to get to live the life she wanted.

She grew up rough and unappreciated too, her light stolen from her or stamped out at nearly every opportunity by leeches and losers. After a life of waiting, she finally met her own cheerleader, just as I was coming into puberty, and together she and him began forging the lives they wanted. Their love was branded by sharing music together and making each other laugh as much and as often as possible. They inspired each other to be the best versions of themselves. For the first time, I got to see my mom start to live her best life and pursue her passions. Her creative quest was then cut short, as she died at the age of 38 from cancer, when I was 19.

It took me a long time to be open to creativity after that. I got really stuck in my ways of just working and drinking and smoking and gaming and cleaning and sleeping and working again, over and over for almost a decade until I reconnected with my now fiancé Graham. We’ve known each other a long time, and I’ve loved him deeply from the moment I first saw him. Something back then told me to wait, though, that I wasn’t quite ready, and I know now that he felt the same. We weren’t yet ready for the life we’d make together.

I was quite battered by the time we finally came back into each other’s lives. But something about his outlook on life was different from anyone I’d known. He seemed so uninhibited to me. Anything is possible in his eyes. He’d been to film school — people from my life didn’t do things like that. And at the time we got together, he was in school again, for writing. Who was this man? He was writing a book, he was going to be a filmmaker. He was so incredibly cool, and frighteningly, irresistibly interesting. Something in my soul pulled me to him, nearly ordering me to go with him.

Many parts of me wanted to be jealous of him, but I found myself stamping out that feeling at every turn, trying to open my mind to his perspective because I had an insatiable need to know more about how and why he was so self-assured, and how I could be, too. I wondered why he was interested in me, and what he could possibly have seen in me. Why was he so sure that I could be a creative? Something drew me deeper and deeper into his world even though I was terrified of what our future would look like if I followed him. “We can’t both be starving artists,” I’d say to myself.

He exposed me to new people with that same outlook; people who just did what they wanted to do, with conviction and without shame. Suddenly I was a fish out of water, flailing and flopping about, spinning and seething, wailing and wondering why I had denied myself the thing I wanted most all along, which was to be myself. Why had I nailed myself to a cross? Why did I waste time feeling as if my life was over, when really it hadn’t even begun yet?

I now have the great honor and privilege of working with all of those lovely people who scared the shit out of me when I first met them, who now inspire me to dig deeper into my creativity, to work better and harder and to strive with all of my might to make something that I, and we, are proud of. It is my goal now to give myself grace, to return a helping hand to those who lent it to me first, without conditions — to inspire our team, and all who listen to our stories, to dream with me.