Incomplete sentences make up the majority of the thousands of words I’ve written today. The other bits and bobs are unfinished paragraphs strung together with partial ideas and half-baked thoughts, and as frustrating as these creative blocks can be, I still choose to peck away at my keyboard without pause.
There’s a time and a place to give up, but our dreams are not one of them.
I can’t tell you how often I’ve tried to push something through only to discover that I should have walked away before I started. More often than not, because hindsight is 20/20, I can look back at these experiences and point to moments early on in the process when my intuition had tried to warn me, and I had effectively ignored it.
I was in the final round of interviews for my dream job. Part of me was still in disbelief that this organization would want little ol’ me. If I’m being candid, I was flattered and felt rather pompous about the whole thing. At the same time, a little voice in my head told me to run. Not in the direction of my so-called dreams, but in the opposite direction.
Feeling rather silly about wanting to avoid my dream job, I chalked up my feelings to butterflies and pushed through. The hiring committee popped up on the Zoom screen, and a sickly feeling began rising from the pit of my stomach. Not because I thought I was terrible at interviews or felt incapable of doing the job were it offered to me, but because I felt a wave of visceral anger welling up inside me.
Maybe you think I self-sabotaged myself, or perhaps you think I wasn’t qualified for the job. Quite the contrary, the job was mine if I wanted it, but it appeared I’d have to go without a stomach lining. You see, while I often have stomach aches due to nerves, it was only after the interview, when I knew the job was mine that the little voice in my head began to shout.
‘YOU’VE BETRAYED US!’ It said.
My dream wasn’t to work for this organization. My ego had gotten the best of me. The pride I imagined feeling when I saw their name on my resume had overshadowed my intuition. Knowing myself is one thing. Listening to myself is an entirely different set of skills — a set of skills I’ve been actively developing so that I can stop betraying my dreams in the name of ego.
This is not to say that every time I get a stomach ache that it’s a sign I’ve betrayed my innermost self. There are times when all the butterflies in the world need to be ignored, and we must do the hard thing anyway. The point is to recognize the difference between fear of the unknown and fear of self-betrayal. Our intuition is wiser than our thinking minds, and when we stumble across a deeply held dream, it’s there to push us through our fear.
To ignore our fears when faced with an actual danger is inadvisable at best. But it’s a different thing entirely when we allow countless what if’s to dictate what dreams we reach for. On some level, we know this. Otherwise, our dreams, some of which we’ve held onto since childhood, would simply leave us alone.
Let me be the bearer of bad news: fear is part of the package.
When it comes to walking the path towards our dreams, fear is inevitable because, in the pursuit of dreams, uncertainty is inevitable. But at some point, each of us will find ourselves at a crossroads where decisions must be made: let our curiosity guide us or allow our fear to stop us.
I’ve dreamt of being a published author for as long as I can remember. But it wasn’t until fairly recently that I entertained the possibility. At some point, the fear of not trying trumped my fear of failure. Leaving this world still wondering whether I was brave enough to reach for my dreams feels scarier than missing my mark were I to try.
Some days, trying looks like bits and bobs, unfinished paragraphs, and half-baked thoughts. On other days it looks like fingers flying across the keyboard and insomnia due to a deluge of ideas. But every day, it feels like coming home.
Not knowing every step along the way is part of the process.
And embarking on the journey despite this fact is where so many of us give up. But if we’re willing to let our intuition guide us, we become crystal clear about who we are and what we stand for.
The value of dreaming doesn’t lie in the number of ego boosts we get or any guarantees for an end product we’re proud of. Far more critical are the discoveries we make about ourselves along the way. Because when we set aside our fears, we become the person we were always meant to be.
