Dare to Dream

“Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true”

~ lyrics from Somewhere Over the Rainbow

We were waiting for a friend at Starbucks a Saturday two weeks back and this song—or a somewhat jazzy version of it—came on over the speakers. As someone who had lost some faith in the idea of “pursuing your passions” with the state of the job market and my place in it, I found these few lines in the lyrics suddenly rather striking. Frankly, I’ve always been pretty idealist. I’ve always believed that to really excel at something, you have to be passionate about it, and I chose my field of study in college accordingly. I knew that I loved to write, that I loved the intricacy of words and the ways that people use them, and that was what I did.

I can’t tell you how many times I have wondered since my graduation ceremony if I should have chosen to study something else. Wanting to be a novelist is all well and good, but let’s be practical here. Of course I knew I’d have to do other things at the same time, I just hadn’t quite counted on how hard finding those “other things” could be. Writing and the analytical skills that come with doing it well are skills you can use anywhere, people used to tell me. But when it comes to the competitive marketplace, “anywhere” and “nowhere” can feel awfully similar.

Dreaming big is great. It can motivate us to work hard, to strategize—but at the same time, big dreams come with high expectations, and high expectations can cause a lot of stress. It can get to the point where it’s not enough to work hard. There are just so many possibilities, so many ways that we can succeed but even more ways that we can fail, and it all races around in circles in my head until I’m being crushed under the weight of my own dreams. It takes these little moments just chatting with a friend over a cup of coffee to step back and realize how ridiculous I’m being.

So what if things haven’t gone exactly as I planned? There’s always another way to reach a destination, and who knows? I’ve already found and done so many things along the way that I never would have known about otherwise—learned about other types of careers and different kinds of classes, designed a logo, entered an art competition, etc. And if there is one thing I’ve learned as a writer, it’s that every experience counts. True, big dreams can lead to big disappointments, but that doesn’t mean we stop dreaming. Being afraid of the outcome doesn’t mean that those dreams disappear, but it sure does get in the way of trying to make them come true!