The Dreamer in Me

It’s a world for thinkers, isn’t it, this one we live in?

A world where everything has a name. A world where everything and everyone has a reason to be. In this thinking dominated world, it’s all about the boxes, isn’t it? You know the ones—you’re hovering over one right this very minute, trying to decide if and how these words will fit into your life. By the end of reading this, you should know which box this little blog post of mine belongs in. And for the real dreamers among you…you knew from the very first sentence. Didn’t you?

I should probably explain this idea of ‘boxes’ from my place in the world as a creative person—a musician, an actor, a writer, a dreamer—because I’m betting there are flocks of my kind out there, who glide along on the surface of life, happy enough to go with the flow, but feeling, somehow, that they are a bit of an imposter in this big old world of thinking and doing.

When I was in my late teens, I looked at the world and I just knew my wide-eyed dreams didn’t quite belong. Every face I passed on the street seemed to live under a blanket of grey, dead eyes going about life like it was just something that must be done, without question, without…colour.  Was this what I had to look forward to? Dreams all wrapped up, locked away behind the curtain of responsibility? Right then and there, in my sparkling seventeen-year old wonderland, I closed my eyes tight and I swore to myself. This will never happen to me.

I’ve thought about that moment so many times over the past fifteen years or so. Because guess what? That promise I made to myself, the one that gifted me a life of floating in the breeze, of spreading my wings wide and flying into the setting sun—I smashed it to pieces. This thinking world smashed it to pieces. Sucked up the dreams. Spat me out on the other side all shiny and nice and ready to please everyone other than the person that mattered most in my life. Me. I know when it happened, too. It was around about the time I joined the work-life crowd when I bundled everything I was into neatly labeled boxes and became a responsible adult. And right before my very eyes—without me even knowing it was happening— my lovely little dream world was trampled flat.

For those of you who’ve come to know me via this blog, or my old one, you might be surprised to hear that my dream world ever went anywhere—since I very definitely have been plonking bits and pieces of it into these little bloggy worlds of mine, for a few years now. But yes. It did go somewhere for a time.

Well! Quite happily, and for no particular reason, it seems like I just might be back. All of me. Because after all these years of thinking that my ‘boxes’ needed to be packed in the same way as everyone else’s boxes…I’ve finally given myself permission to say this:

‘Dear world, I am a dreamer. I always have been, and I always will be. So, you can take your serious thoughts and angry eyes away from me, because giggling and sunshine is just what I do. And I will do my very best never to forget that again.’