Returning To The Dreams I Let Go Of

How I’m making my childhood desires come true.

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time doing some things that are very new to me. Well, on second thought, they’re not new to me all. They’re actually very old to me.

They’re things which are related to goals I made when I was a child. Things I dreamt about doing, but never actually did.

Until now.

When I was around seven or eight years old, one of my favorite things to do was read superhero comic books. After a short time, I got it into my head that maybe I should create my own superhero. I then sat down and drew and wrote a complete story for a character named Lightning Bolt Boy.

I had a lot of fun doing it and I continued creating stories about the character for several months. But as much as I loved coming up with the stories, I got tired of the drawing part of it and I stopped.

I then moved on to writing short stories and I spent most of my time filling up notebooks with my writings. I loved it and I told myself that I was going to be a writer when I grew up.

It was also around this time that I fell in love with music. Much like the inspiration I had from comic books, the music I was hearing on the radio inspired me to write songs.

I didn’t know how to play any musical instruments, but I felt confident I could write song lyrics. And I did. Over the next few years, I wrote at least one hundred songs. Sometimes I’d even place the song lyrics into the short stories I wrote.

My dream of someday being a writer evolved into a dream about someday becoming both a writer and a songwriter.

As you can probably tell from the above, I was heavily influenced by things I loved in pop culture. Another perfect example of this is the effect the Rocky movies had on me. Like Rocky, I saw myself as someone who other people may have unfairly dismissed for one reason or another.

Rocky showed people that they were wrong about him. He showed them all that he could be a winner. He made me feel like I could be a winner too.

While Rocky didn’t inspire me to box, I was inspired by the scenes in the movie when he’d run through the streets of Philadelphia. I was horrible at all of the team sports I was forced to do with other kids, but I thought that maybe I’d do better at running.

I started waking up very early to go for runs in my neighborhood. I was a horrible runner at first, but I got better over time. One thing that helped me was thinking of the music from the movie as I ran, especially the legendary theme song: “Gonna Fly Now” by Bill Conti.

I loved running and decided to add it to my dreams for the future. Now my plan was to be a writer, songwriter, and runner when I grew up.

While my songwriting stopped sometime during high school, I continued writing fiction and non-fiction. However, most of what I’ve written has never been seen by anyone other than myself. The reasons for that are a little too complex to fully explain here, but it mostly boiled down to me having low self-esteem and being afraid of failing. These fears and insecurities ended up having horrible effects on my creativity. If I did write anything, I was afraid to show it to anyone. That, in turn, would often stop my desire to write anything at all.

I liked to tell myself that I was still a writer, but I was having a hard time believing it. I felt like I was lying to myself.

This year, my wife was considering Medium as a potential place for her writing. She’s always been very supportive of me and encouraged me to try Medium too. I was reluctant at first, but her excitement about writing here inspired me to join her.

I told myself to try both fiction and non-fiction here. I published my first piece at the end of June and it felt good.

Really, really good.

Days later, I wrote and published more. And then more. As I continued to write and publish here, my confidence kept growing and I started to believe in myself again. As of the writing of this article you’re reading, I’ve written over 30 pieces here — in just under two months.

While I’m happy about that, there’s another part of this experience that makes me feel even happier. It’s that I no longer feel like I’m lying to myself when I say I’m a writer.

I know that I’m a writer.

I’ve even started writing poetry, which is something I’d never attempted until now.

Or had I? I’m finding it to be very similar to writing song lyrics like I did many, many years ago. With writing poems now, I sort of feel like I’m writing songs again.

I feel like I’m finally accomplishing my childhood goals of being a writer.

But what about that goal I had about being a runner?

Well, my childhood running completely stopped in 1980 when I was 14 years old. That was when I became a cigarette smoker, a habit that lasted for 35 years. Shortly after quitting smoking in 2015, I had a lot of excess energy to burn off, so I started going for daily walks. One of those days, without planning to do so beforehand, I was walking and got a sudden desire to run — which is something I hadn’t done in 35 years.

It felt good and I’ve kept at it since then. I even ran a Half Marathon a couple of years ago. I’ll do another one again when the world gets a little more “back to normal,” but for now I’m very happy going for runs by myself.

Reentering the activities that made me happy when I was a child has been life-changing for me. I feel both emotionally and physically healthier than I ever have before.

Now that this article is finished, I’ve met my writing goals for today. I’m going to go and reward myself with a nice run in my local park.

Gonna fly now…

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