postponing the self

Every Sunday has a special feel to it. To me, it’s the day before a brand new work week, and a day of planning and possibility. It’s of course paired with the Sunday scaries, a grief filled process of slowly saying goobye to our freedom from employment; the few days we get each week to live untethered to our post. I’ll savour every second as best I can.

Possibility is compelling and essential, a property of our imagination that feeds hope and motivation. I have always been a dreamer, an addict of the thought of what could be. It has served me well to be this way, to use my Sundays to think of what’s next.

Each week I look ahead and think of all the ways I will become more of who I want to be; the classic late night inspired plan to rebrand my existence on a whim. I know quite firmly who I want to become and each Sunday I dream more of her, how do I become her this week?

But there is another part to this: the reality that dreams are refuge from the ails of the present. The simple truth is that for much of my life, this imagination is what kept me safe from the things I wasn’t safe from. I would dream of tomorrow, the day I was taken away, made more important, more interesting than I was. I would be the one that those things wouldn’t happen to. I’d dream that someone would appear and remind me of who I could be, the imagined other me. They would tell be I’ve always been her.

In reality, I’ve always been the dreamer, not the dream.

I will say, it would be a disservice to the young dreamer to say that it is a regressive task to dream. As I’ve gotten older, I have gotten closer to the vision of my ideal self. Each year resembling her more and more. I am proud of how far I have come, but I still have miles to go. But it is not the act of dreaming that got me here.

So Sunday holds this magical alchemical possibility of a week ahead, but what does the week itself hold? Are the dreams of our Sundays the realities of our week? For me, my week often looks like a real thing, not a dream or mirage of perfection. They have grit to them, character. They also involve the real me, the one that is not who I want to be, but simply what I have become.

My week is also full of both excuses and modifications due to real limitations. I want to be clear that both are present, we have lives to live and dreams are dreams for a reason. You see, this is not an essay about not becoming who we want or to shit on dreams for their idealism. This is about timing; this is about Sunday, our weeks, our days.

For me, I often put off the person I want to be; I reserve her for braver days, for when more energy will come. I fantasize about the sudden change to my life, a potion, a shooting star or a spell to intervene. But it’s me that will have to do all of this; what am I really waiting for?

Really, I think I am waiting for nothing, instead finding the coziness of fantasy more attractive than the work of becoming. I do not think I can become my ideal self tomorrow, but I can try, and often, I don’t even do that.

I’m comfortable in my reality, and even more comfortable pretending that if I keep dreaming, it will happen. But it takes work; it takes showing up.

Without too much of a tangent, it is worth saying that I want a lifetime of becoming and not an overnight fix. I don’t want to be who I will end up as so early, but I want to get closer. I want to live through that and feel it as much as I can.

Knowing who I want to become is a luxury I have that I should exercise, but I will not rush her. It would be a shame to rush the final version of me, who I will be at my dying breath, to be the same for 60 more years. But even more of a shame would be holding her back, reserving her for some other time, postponing the process of becoming her. Get closer, she says. Don’t turn her down!

Postponing the self or the dream is the process of behaving as if our dream will come true miraculously at some other time. It’s the ‘I’ll do x tomorrow’ ‘when y happens I’ll do z’. It’s when the thing we’re waiting for is arbitrary, the conditions more perfect than they need to be to take simple baby steps. We stand still because we’re waiting for something we don’t need to wait for. We’re procrastinating, stalling, putting the work off; we’re delaying the dream.

Leaving our dreams for a future date is not the way to make them happen. We need action, and we need to exercise our agency as best we can. We need to make our Sundays mean something. We’ve got to get to work.

It will not be in ideal circumstances, and it will not be our ideal selves. We will be in the closest to ideal circumstances, with our closest to ideal self. This is what we’ve got to work with; it’s the only thing we have if we want to make it happen. So we need to figure out where we’re at and what we can do right now. We need not jump headfirst, though we can if that works for us.

We need to take a step, and each day, another step. We can trigger the act of unfolding, the dance we do as we grow through our lives in small but meaningful ways.

Let’s continue our Sundays with dreams in hand, but bring them to the week as best we can. Tomorrow is Monday. You want to be more social? Call a friend. More connected to your body? Do a body scan. Reduce your screen time? Clean your room or hobby it up.

We have small, meaningful acts that can fill our weeks. We can enter the process of becoming our ideal by wading in the water, walking closer and closer, exponentially more submerged in the process as we walk. By next Sunday, you’ll be farther from the shore, deeper than you’ve ever been. You’ll be dreaming again, and you’ll see more of you in the vision. You’ll be more of the vision than you were.