Your Dream Life

It’s funny how dreaming about things – ambitions, projects, versions of a life – can feel so vastly different to actually doing them. There is such safety in a dream because nothing has happened yet, but everything could – and therein lies the false security of it.

I have lived for years being so comfortable in a cocoon where I told myself I wanted to be a writer, wanted to live a life where creativity was a daily practice, wanted to see my words in the world. And I did write, here and there, in bursts when the feeling hit, when energy raced from my chest to the tips of my fingertips, and I couldn’t type fast enough for all the thoughts I needed to translate.

But I also spent a lot of time thinking about being a writer or creative person. Daydreaming through scenarios, envisioning a time where I might be perfectly at liberty to do what I wanted and therefore do everything, having nothing out of reach. In our dream worlds, we can be poets and potters and entrepreneurs and actresses, and the sensation is dizzying. Potential always tastes so sweet.

This weekend, I went on a writer’s retreat to a cottage in a beautifully picturesque village in Oxfordshire with five other writers, and we spent the weekend working on our various projects – being creative.

It was the smallest taste of what life would look like were I a full-time author – we rose early, worked on our manuscripts, stopped when we needed a break, walked when the words weren’t coming, ate, slept and did it all over again.

The first day was a bit of an idyll. The river flowed, bubbling merrily by, five thousand words typed with very little active resistance. The second day was a different story. My proverbial river was dammed – you name the vegetation, it was in there, choking up the flow until each word felt like the most herculean effort. All six of us struggled in some capacity on the second day, with character, plot, and sometimes, the whole bloody thing (at one point, I contemplated giving up on the novel and defenestrating my laptop).

We also talked about the realities of being an author – one of the group has been published, and it made me realise how the jig doesn’t stop once you have your finished book in your hands – there’s promotion, and bestseller lists, and horrifying Goodreads reviews as people actually read The Thing you’ve poured your creativity and often years of work into.

It was a bit of a reality check about what it actually means to do the dream. In our minds, the grass is not only greener, it’s free of inconvenience and strife. If you daydream about leaving your job, for instance, the alternative – backpacking around Australia, or a career pivot – will both meet and fail to meet your expectations. When I imagine my creative life, I type merrily away for a few hours and then waft about with whimsy, baking bread or raking my lawn. The reality would no doubt be a little different.

Every day since the retreat, I’ve had the urge to keep writing. Perhaps it is the consequence of banging out eleven thousand words over the weekend, going back to Normal Life and having the Mother of All Periods, but I’ve really had to work hard to get the words on the page in a way that doesn’t happen when I write off the cuff. Consistency and discipline is – duh – hard, even more so when creativity is like trying to catch a fish covered in washing up liquid – slippery, and it doesn’t always happen just because you want it to.

I’ve stressed about word counts, worried that my characters are too flat, that the story will be boring, that I don’t know enough about the technical parts of a pirate ship to accurately portray the experience of being on one (yay for weird search history: What is a forecastle / How many pirates to crew one pirate ship / What is a junior nun called, and many, many more). For every time that the words flow out of me, there are three more hours spent glaring at an empty page thinking: “Where the heck do I go next?”

Dreaming is essential. It lets us have hope and optimism. It certainly gives me the feeling that the future can be so much closer to my vision for myself than the one I’m experiencing now. Dreaming has enabled me to believe in myself, and to nurture that quiet knowing that says ‘I will do this’, and to understand that the life I want will be mine.

However, there is also a gap. The gap between the dreaming and the doing, and we love to fill it with all kinds of things.

I saw a video (here) that completely shifted my brain. She said:

Fast food gives you fake energy.

Alcohol gives you fake confidence.

Procrastination gives you fake peace.

Overplanning gives you fake progress.

People-pleasing gives you fake love.

It is WAY safer to stay in any of these categories, in the same way that the dream is far cosier and inviting than the reality – you get to pretend you have the life without actually living the life.

But in the same way that fast food might give you a quick buzz only to (often) leave you feeling worse, and hungrier than before, dreaming gives us direction towards the things that we want but also a false sense of security that we are actually heading towards them.

Instagram lady then said:

Whole foods give you real energy.

Practice gives you real confidence.

Discipline gives you real peace.

Taking action gives you real progress.

Setting boundaries gives you real love.

She finished the video saying: “The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding.”

Take me, for example (yes, back to me, bear with). Loves to write, wants to be a writer, dreams about writing. Also me: terrified of feedback (perish the thought), terrified of not being good enough, terrified of failing in my dream. Ergo, safely existing as a person who writes occasionally, a slow build towards the goal. Would still rather die than let someone read my work (apart from you, dear reader!).

My gap between dreaming and doing is that I don’t write regularly, and I need to open myself up to the what ifs of the world, to criticism, to the idea that I might be both not good enough and completely enough. Emotional work and practical work – no wonder I’ve spent so much time running from either!

So for now, I’m trying to write every day. No numbers, just an open laptop and a brain that sometimes cooperates. At the heart of this all is forgiveness of the self – I don’t blame me for procrastination and all the other things I’ve filled that gap with. But I also don’t want to allow it any more.