01. Secrets + Dreams
On long held dreams, creating, and playing your cards close to your chest.
When I was in high school, we had to do a work study. Though we knew nothing about who we might become, we were told to pick the job we wanted to do one day, reach out to a person who had that job, and ask if we could follow them around for a week.
I picked a lawyer, because it was a dream that sounded worthwhile to sixteen-year-old me, but really, I was making choices based on things I thought I should want, rather than things I actually did want. There was only one person in my class who already knew what she wanted to be.
When we came back from that week, all anyone wanted to know was how she’d found it, was it everything she imagined it would be? After a full morning of fending us off politely, she eventually asked us all to drop it: “This is my dream”, she said, “that experience belongs to me, and I’m not ready to share it with anyone else yet.”1
She probably doesn’t even remember saying it, but that single sentence made a massive impression on me, but it comes back to me often (case in point). I’m thinking about it now, because I’m working on something. A few somethings, in fact.
They are the massive moving pieces in the oversized chess game that makes up my own dream, and I feel like I’m dragging them into position bodily. I used to berate myself for focusing on so many different things, feeling like all those divergent somethings were competing creative projects, that I should focus, beating myself up whenever the chaos goblin that powers my creative brain pointed to a different piece I needed to haul across the board.
I keep recalling the specific delivery of one of the lines of dialogue in the audiobook for The Raven Boys, where Kalla touches Rowan and says: “He’s creating.”
My competing projects are all actually the same project, one cohesive body of work when you zoom out far enough. I’m pulling in one direction. I’m creating.
I’m not ready to share my dream with anyone yet, but parts of it are leaking out my edges, and this is the bucket I’ve set out to catch the drips.
Credits: Sentences, illustration & photos by me.
In case you’re wondering, she currently has that dream job — and she’s fantastic at it.