Admittedly, I’m a huge daydreamer. I’ve spent countless numbers of minutes and hours in my own head thinking of situations that may never exist. While sometimes this just means envisioning how a certain event will play out, it often turns into me making up ideal outcomes. After doing this time and time again, I finally realized my daydreaming is ruining my perceptions of reality.

While I was daydreaming, I would think up seemingly “perfect” play-by-plays of what was to come. This itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Actually, it was my generally optimistic personality that caused me to do this. However, this daydreaming caused many realities to become a “let down.” Why is this? Basically, when I was fantasizing the perfect outcomes of things, I was setting myself up for disappointment.

Life is not perfect. Whether we like to realize it or not, you can daydream and plan things in advance, but in the end, we never truly know what outcome of what will be. Personally, this was hard for me to grasp. I constantly thought up the aftereffect of situations of everything in my head. Sometimes this would mean an upcoming hard conversation, a social event, or the actions of others. In the end, nothing really went exactly how I would expect it to, and I often was left disappointed. I had anticipated the very best, but the very best was often not my reality.

Up until this year, I did not realize the harm this was doing to me. I went into situations with those expectations that I had completely made up in my head usually halfway expecting them to come true. Sure, I realized that I was daydreaming, but come on, we all want things to be ideal, don’t we? My reality, nine times out of ten, was often less exciting, less glamorous, or less pleasurable than my fantasy had been. Ultimately, I was causing myself more harm than help. I had clung on to my expectations and found it hard to accept my reality each time the two didn’t match up. I had been doing this my entire life, and while sometimes things obviously went better than expected, a lot of times my fantasies trumped reality leaving me feeling unsatisfied.

Moving forward, I have learned to go into every situation with no expectations. I try to never have a preconceived notion of how events are going to play out. In doing this, I cannot be disappointed with a fantasy coinciding with reality as I had no expected outcome in the first place. As I grow older, I realize time and time again the unpredictability of life and the twists and turns that come with every day’s events. Life’s not always a dream, and I’ve definitely had my fair share of curveballs thrown my way. Sometimes the timing of things isn’t right, things change unexpectedly, and, quite frankly, sometimes situations are unexplainably terrible; expecting my perfect fantasy was not helping me cope with these facts.

I’ll never stop daydreaming. I truly do believe that daydreaming helps people to remain goal-oriented and focused on their futures. However, I no longer allow myself to believe that my dreams would definitely become reality as I had in the past. Now, I remind myself to be optimistic, but never to assume the very best endings. As I go into events with no expectations, I have found myself happier, more satisfied, and often surprised by how well things go. My fantasies exist in my head, and they are just as beautiful and perfect as before. Only now, those fantasies remain there only, in my head, their only proper place.

I do not intend for this article to be pessimistic, but more as guidance. I often did not realize that I was the one causing myself to become unhappy with a situation’s outcomes, and I’ve known other people to have the same problem. In the end, as humans, all we can really do is hope for the best. We can remain optimistic while also acknowledging that we are not always in control of what is to come, especially of the actions of others. My hope is that this too can help other people who may have the same issue. Remember, let your fantasies live on in your mind, and never stop daydreaming. However, acknowledge that your realities may never live up to these expectations, and also realize that that’s perfectly all right. Your realities are just as beautiful as your fantasies, but in a different way, because each outcome has a specific purpose. Your reality will be exactly what it is supposed to be, in the end, so never let any of your own fantasies ruin that for you.