How I realized my dreams are dead

If you can't bring them back to life...

Around a year ago, I attempted The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, a 12-week course that is meant to get you back into the well of your creativity. Apparently having a decades-long bone-dry well is not an uncommon problem among adults.

Week 4 is media deprivation week, meaning I couldn’t read or consume any media for that time. I was convinced that when the revelations came in the absence of all this noise, they would themselves as the lush, beautiful treasures that would blow open the quagmire of my 15-year creative block.

Instead, the first, perhaps the main, emergent result happened to be the realization that I had been grieving my strangled dream of writing creatively for my entire adult life, and the realization that despite all my objective successes in academia and my career over that time, I hadn’t been able to do the one thing I’ve always wanted to do.

I wrote stories in my preteens and early teens. I never had goals or structure, I only had the implacable force of imagination that compelled me to try and give life to the visions and overheard conversations in my head. I didn’t think, I simply wrote. Although I fretted about it back then, I realize now that whether I was ‘good’ or not was not a relevant question. I was as free as I will ever be, although my young, naive self didn’t realize it at the time. It’s hard to understand a concept without knowing the absence of it.

As a budding academician in my 20s, I was always confused as to why whenever I won an award, or published a paper, or received an accolade, the first bright, short-lived burst of satisfaction always devolved into unease and eventually, a sense of despair. It only drove me to do more of what caused that despair in the vain hope that the next time might be different, that when I just got this many citations or published in that journal or won that national award, it would fill the hole in my heart.

Not doing the one thing you want to do most hurts. For me, it’s a sore spot just to the right of my sternum. Emotionally, it feels like shame and despondence. It’s an old wound, probably re-opened multiple times— when it did, I just never knew what it was or why it did. Occasionally I’d feel the chasm of my insides and not understand it.

Now I know it’s grief for the dreams I used to hold, so effortlessly and with such grace, until I lost them to ‘the real world’ and the practical considerations of getting an education and a respectable career. Maybe what hurts the most is my failure to recognize their worth, and that I shunned them so easily at the time.

My husband says I’ll never be fulfilled because I’m always looking for deeper meaning where there might not be any. In the years in which he’s known me, this seems true. He’s only ever known me in by blocked state, a grieving widow for a dead partner no one else knew about. To him it looks like I’ll never be happy creatively because that’s just my personality.

But I know better. I remember my preteen self and how she created so freely and happily, who spun realities out of the loom of her thoughts and dreams, and loved them because they were hers. At one time, I was happy in my creations simply because they existed.

I know I can be happy because I’ve felt it before. I want to find a way to access this creative freedom again— maybe not in the exact way I used to, so effortlessly and gracefully, but with perhaps the only weapon I still have at my disposal: knowing how to work hard.

We can’t get back innocence— it’s an ever-decreasing quantity. The innocence of not knowing or feeling the societal forces that would crush anything that didn’t conform to its capitalist and consumerist ideals will forever be gone. Perhaps I’ve been grieving that too.

Grief has stages, as we all know. They only progress faster if you actually know what you are grieving. I’ve been stuck in bargaining and sadness and denial and anger, cycling between them, over and over, for the last even 15 years, but not understanding why. That week of media deprivation helped me realize that I’ve been grieving my dreams. It’s finally time to put an end to the cycle, accept the death of the old dreams, and create new ones.