Should I Give Up On My Dream?

There’s more to that than you think

Yeah… that’s a tough one.

Because… if I say yes, I run the risk of encouraging people to live a very very hard life of uphill battle after uphill battle. Which means they run the risk of burnout and bitterness.

But… if I say no, then I’m not just a realist. But I’m also a jaded asshole.

I’ve told myself that a TON all throughout my 20’s. Especially after I graduated college and my blueprint for life ran out.

But fast forward a few years, and I found something of an equilibrium to pursuing my dreams without really pursuing my dreams.

Allow me to elaborate.

The Social Narrative & Your Narrative

If you’re American or visited/know a lot about America, then you’ll know that there’s a lot of pressure put towards “Doing what you love”. Or even further, “Making a living doing what you love.”

And there’s nothing wrong with this statement at face value.

That being said, it runs the risk of misinterpretation.

This statement makes people assign doing what you love to making a living and/or who they are.

Why is that a problem?

Let me ask you this: what happens if you do what you love for a living… and fail?

Seriously. Entertain it for a second.

What if you failed?

For a lot of people, they start despising life because of at least one of these reasons:

• They feel lied to and therefore can’t trust the world
• They connect what they love to who they are and now they assign the outcomes to their own identities

That means if what they love succeeds, then they as a person are a success.

Or…

If it fails, then they as a person are a failure.

And look, that’s just not true.

It just means what you love didn’t work in that way.

Remember this too:

People who are seen as successful actually fail more than people who are seen as failures. They just kept failing until they succeeded.

But what does success mean?

Well, that’s up to you.

Because we feed what we love through a social narrative.

The social narrative says:

“Do what you love! Make money out of it! Never work a day job with an idiot boss again!”

But that narrative (The American Dream, Hollywood, etc.) has a really nasty habit of making the exception the norm.

We identify the guy who started a rock band or tried acting and became a household name as both the guy who got lucky and the only standard of what it means to make it in that field.

I can’t be the only one that feels like that’s ass-backwards.

Think of it like this: according to narrative therapy, you are the protagonist of your own story.

You may be a part of a society, but why are you making the societal narrative your own personal narrative?

I promise you doing what you love & success have a very different relationship when you build your own desires and take your own journey.

Even if it’s against the grain of the world around you.

The Dream & The Dreamer

I was inspired to write this after watching a video from the YouTube channel Cinema Therapy where the hosts, a filmmaker and a therapist, dissect the themes and structure of the film Wonka.

***IF DAD HUMOR IS NOT YOUR THING, VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED XD****

I’m going to paraphrase him just to keep it short, sweet, and mindful of your time but Alan Seawright said something that me have a major aha moment.

In fact, it was more of a HOLY SHIT moment.

Life’s not about pursuing your dreams. It’s about pursuing the life of a dreamer.

What does that mean?

It means that the life of a dreamer permits you to have the openness and adaptability that somebody who’s pursuing a dream doesn’t always recognize and therefore act upon.

It goes back to the assigning of identity.

If you’re pursuing a dream, then you may start to get rigid and overly focused on pursuing that dream.

Which, again, is not bad. It just runs the risk of becoming unhealthy.

When you’re super focused on something you’re able to exert all of your energy into making that dream a reality and for some dreams, that’s the only way to make them happen.

But if you’re a dreamer who does a thing, then you get to explore avenues or methods you would never consider.

For example, ever since I was seven my dream was become a film director and win an Academy Award and go down as one of the greatest in cinema history.

But that never happened.

Instead, I chose to become a hypnotherapist and produce my own work on the side.

When I was pursuing a dream, I assigned that dream to who I was and so if I wasn’t a film director, or an Oscar winner, or one of the greats, then I believed my life was wasted.

But when I reassigned my identity as a dreamer who loves telling stories and the art of filmmaking, suddenly all this pressure was relieved because I could say:

“This thing I love doing actually has a lot of facets to it. Let’s try some and see what happens!”

Instead of:

“I have to be X,Y,Z and I screwed up even if I’m, X,Y, and lowercase z.”

So, in conclusion, it can be okay to give up on your dream depending on your circumstance.

BUT YOU MUST NEVER GIVE UP BEING A DREAMER.

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