Chasing Dreams
I watched NASA the other day launch a rocket from Kennedy Space Center, headed to Mars. It was unmanned, but it had a helicopter that would be used to remotely survey the planet. For what would normally be boring — who am I kidding, it is boring — but I was fascinated. It really took me back way more years than I’m willing to own up to.
When I graduated high school, I headed off to school in Houston, TX with the dream of being an astronaut and working for NASA. I know, big dreams for a little girl from the sticks. Don’t worry, my first semester of squeaking by my first two science and calculus classes — and I mean Titanic-against-the-iceberg-squeak — I knew my eggs were in the wrong basket.
It wasn’t that I no longer wanted it, but I recognized, I didn’t have what was needed to achieve it. I moved to a more suitable degree and moved on the next semester. I found myself one night after moving on from the “NASA” dream, sitting at a table next to an apartment complex pool. I was drinking with someone who was a friend at the time. I sat staring up at the stars and could feel him watching me.
He knew what I had wanted before changing my major. “You really wish you could go up there, don’t you,” he asked.
I nodded, unable to take my eyes off the night sky filled with twinkling stars.
“You think you can find peace up there?” he continued.
I looked over at him and said, “I just want the quiet.”
“It may be quiet up there, but you take all your noise with you.”
First, I have to say, I absolutely hate it was this person I had this conversation with and the fact that he understood me so well. The reason? I may find the strength to share someday. It wasn’t for who he was then, but instead for who he became later.
Second, he did help me learn it’s easy to mistake chasing a dream with running from your problems. And by that point there was so much I was running from; I was too scared to look back.
Instead, I did what every good Catholic girl does. I smashed all those things deep inside and pretended they didn’t exist. Unfortunately, that choice, to try to ignore all my past hurts and insecurities caused me to miss out on some of the freest years I could have had and, like a cascading effect, I made crappy choice after crappy choice. All because they were based on running away not toward.
It wasn’t until after I had my kids and my divorce that I stopped running. It’s only now, twenty years later that I’m finally starting to look backwards. I’m finally starting to look for a way to find my peace. These letters and stories, it’s how I’m taking those steps. It’s how I’m finding the pieces of me lost over the years. My hope is I will find enough to piece myself back together and become who I always should have become.
— S —
“It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you. You make the web you’re in. You’re the spider and the fly…So you made the hospital, conjured that terrible thing you never did to your father. Of course you’re exhausted. And you can hide from it all foreveer in this lovely, quiet, blank void. But you also built a way out.”
Jane Chatwin, The Magicians, S1E4 Sera Gamble and John McNamara