This is your permission to give up on a dream

Like this post about ditching an old dream? Click the little heart and I will smile! ;)

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This week, my husband and I were trying to find the national identity cards of our three kids. At some point in the last couple months we lost them, because we are idiots, and it’s become one of those things we have to deal with, in a vague future-ish sort of way, since we only need to show them a couple times a year, and none of those times appears pressingly imminent.

So I was in the box.

You know the box.

I’m sure you have one. It’s a box. Or a drawer, or a shelf (although the unconfined nature of that does give me pause).

The place where you keep THE IMPORTANT THINGS.

Those things can run the gamut. The passports. The hand-written list of non-secure passwords. The notarized permissions for the children to leave the country with the correct adults. The hospital bracelets from the NICU. The plastic bottle of communion water from the first-born. (The other ones’ waters have been lost, to the gods.)

It is at this point in the story that I tell you we did not find the documents.

(Of course, we did not find the documents.)

But I did find something else.

A magnet!

I love me a good magnet. The big, sturdy kind that can hold more than just one flimsy picture. And I particularly love the big magnets that say the snarky things.

I WANT TO GAY MARRY MY HOT SELF. (on my fridge)

I DIDN’T HEAR YOU, BUT IN MY DEFENSE, I WASN’T LISTENING. (on my fridge)

I PICKED UP DINNER AND THE DINNER IS WINE. (not on my fridge, nor in existence, but should be)

So there she was, just as I had remembered her.

She wasn’t in the best of conditions. Her back had fallen off, her face scratched by unknown talons. But she was there.

When I bought it, when I loved it, I did so because it was funny. It is funny. Wildly funny.

But now, I saw that it held for me a different sort of glint.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams. Not the sleeping ones (although I am reading Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journeys), but the ones we hold for ourselves, on our palms or in our notebooks or on our tongues. And the thing I’ve been thinking is that, despite the Instagram posts of your favorite neighborhood sound healer, many of our dreams ARE stupid.

Or at least some of mine have been.

Here are a few that immediately come to mind.

Dream 1: Have 5 children! Homeschool them! Travel around the world for a year with them all, with their little minimalist suitcases!

Reality: I have three children. They are delightful, amazing treasures. The finest of the species. Unfortunately, if I ever were to homeschool them, or travel with them for long stretches of time, I would be doing so as the shell body of the bones of myself, because my sanity would be dead and buried, under six feet of dirt in a lackluster graveyard, never to be found again.

Dream 2: Take the Trans-Siberian railroad across China and Russia because Mary Morris did in the book I loved and read twice!

Reality: Oh, we took the Transiberian. Me and my best friend, on our self-funded year around the world in our twenties. I even lost my passport along the way, getting stuck for a week in a Chinese border town, where I bought that great Avon (!) face-wash , while my mother screamed at me in the blogspot comments: ARE YOU SAFE? IF YOU ARE NOT SAFE, WHY ARE YOU BLOGGING?!

On the train, it was the dust that killed me. All the crevices. We got off after few days in and flew the rest of the way to Moscow.

Dream 3: Have an office inside my house. Cue 2012, me, speaking to my architect husband building us a fine, fine house. Hello! What a dream! I will have you ideate everything, and handle everything, and I will have only one major request, and that request is essential. It is very important that you place my home office INSIDE THE HOUSE. On the GROUND FLOOR OF THE HOUSE AND NOT IN SOME LESSER, SEPARATE, STEP-CHILDISH OUT-BUILDING. I want to be CLOSE TO THE HEART OF IT ALL. While I do my work. You know, for, like, deliveries?

Reality: No one wants a home office in a train station. And a baby nursery. And a trampoline park. Screw my beautiful blue-ceilinged office with the chandelier light I picked out special. God bless my tiny, overstuffed pod in the backyard where I can get away from it all.

So there you have it. Some of my dreams were stupid. And some of yours were, too.

And some of my dreams probably are stupid, in the present tense.

Many times, you find out in the living of it that you’re not into the dream anymore. Like when the dust started coming into the train, and I turned to Lara with horrified eyes. What have we done? And that’s fine. That’s living. Trying things, failing, trying again.

But sometimes you know beforehand that it’s not your dream anymore, and you stick at it anyway. You were always told not to quit. You were told to persevere. And so you carry it around on your shoulder like a diaper bag with an anvil in it, thumping on your thigh awkwardly with every step you take from place to place, and life to life, as you strategize how you can still somehow accomplish the old dream while at the same time following the other new dream you have. Because god forbid you just leave it there. On the curb. It was your dream! It can’t be all alone there. Dead-looking.

Or can it?

OR CAN IT.

It can. Oh, it can.

This is your permission to kill your old dream. Chuck it. Toss it. Dispose. Out, spot! It’s stupid, that dream. It’s begging to be put to sleep.

That dream is not your life.

But everything else is.

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Have you ever ditched an old dream?

Let me know in the comments.