The other night, I had a rather unusual dream in that it was rather normal. You see, every dream I have ever had has edged on the side of the weird -- a green man throwing trash into my grandpa’s car, giant mechanical bees chasing me, a deja vu expressed in black and white photographs. In essence, my subconscious is just as weird, or even weirder than, my conscious state of being and yet this dream has managed to come back to me, even as many of my dreams fade back into the nether.
I was looking at myself in my bathroom mirror, something that many in the selfie generation might not find strange, and yet for me it’s something I rarely do. Most days I can barely even meet my own gaze as I try to avoid the image of the most pathetic person in the room. And yet, in the dream I smiled as my arms held that pose all weightlifters seem to hit -- the one with the arms curved downward towards the hips. My shoulder blades scrunched together as I eyed the new me the mirror seemed to reflect. I wasn’t buff by any means, and yet my body pulsed with a power I had never felt before.
The dream ended as my eyes glazed over every inch of my body, for the first time proud of what it saw. Something had changed, something deep and internal to get me to that point and as the world faded back into reality, my body rustling beneath the covers, the dream lay temporarily fragmented and forgotten.
Throughout my life I have always aspired to mediocrity. Expectations were the death of freedom. I saw that phrase everywhere I went -- the more you showed your capabilities, the more the world would lump its expectations on top of you until you were so weighed down that you no longer could do, say, or be who you wanted. And so I toned myself down. Instead of showing my intellect, I hid it behind walls of stupid jokes and increasingly pulling out of the real world into my imaginary one. In every aspect of my life I held myself back, in part due to the fear of failure and in part in fear of letting people down. If I or anyone expected something from myself that I could not deliver, then letting someone or myself down was inevitable. Better to taper off what they expected from me so that when I would rise to the occasion, they were surprised and happy. Recently, I have realized that that was a bullshit way of looking at the world.
My thought process has led me to live a mediocre life and to expect to always be living a mediocre life. But I am so fucking tired of being mediocre. All my life, I have had people who have seen something in me that I ignored, some level of potential that they tried to cultivate in me by pushing me. And while I would allow them, I never pushed myself. One day, I will write an open letter to many of those who have pushed me in this life to be better, because I sincerely believe I would not have come this far without any of them. But at some point, everyone has to take responsibility for their own life. It’s my turn to push myself. My turn to see the potential within me and form it into the person I will one day become.
This semester I came up with two goals to work towards: to work on my novel consistently, and get into a workout routine. Neither one of these are the end goals, but rather stepping stones towards something greater. They are simply meant to build habits that I want to form for the rest of my life so that I can someday create more concrete goals to work towards. I’m tired of living a mediocre life, tired of the constant self-doubt and self-shaming mediocrity inspires. The dream I talked about wasn’t simply about gaining muscle, but about building myself into someone I could be proud of being.
To fight for one’s dream is a noble endeavor, but to understand one's dream and all it entails and necessitates is a wise one. Before you can achieve your dream, you have to know what you need to sacrifice to attain it. If dreams were easy, everyone would have achieved theirs. The first step is by changing your mindset. Stop ragging on yourself all day, every day, and realize you have the potential to achieve whatever you want to. That is infinitely more difficult to put into practice than it sounds. Take life one step at a time and with each step you take, make sure it’s towards where you want to go, rather than where the world is pushing you.
