Death To The Dreams of Youth.

A little bit of forewarning that this piece of writing is very much straight off the dome, no editing so apologies in advance for likely many syntactical errors – I wanted to write and just get things off my head and heart and somewhere better than the notes app on my phone. I’m paying to host this website after all… So the other week my colleague asked me something. Something I didn’t envision to sit with me for so long. She asked me if now at thirty, I felt like I am where I thought I would be as a child. And I remember tasting each word carefully, slowly and finally I gave an unsure answer – I told her. I honestly don’t know. I’ve been thinking a lot about the dreams of youth lately and wondering whether my ‘aha!’ moment will happen or whether the rest of my life will be a continuous stream of mild mundanity punctuated by the occasional holiday abroad, celebrating my loved ones milestones,  spending money on nice things. 

When I meet my friend N for dinner one evening, we both wear the same mask across our faces, it is etched with lines of worry but mostly of tiredness. We drink wine and beer, and we eat fries that are too hot and burn our fingers, we lick the remnants of a too rich crème brûlée off spoons whilst we empathise with each other. There is an unspoken stagnancy that sits in the air among us, both of us wondering if this is ‘it’. We discuss careers, we talk about marriage or lack thereof, we discuss comparison and finally, we both touch on the idea of running away and abandoning the dreams our parents set out before us, blowing our savings and just travelling the world doing nothing in particular until we simply couldn’t anymore. And then we both laugh knowing we are the children of immigrant parents who worked too hard for their children to just ‘blow’ everything on the frivolities of life, but the thought of just being in this same space for the next thirty years feels too much to bear. I think I had always looked forward to setting up a home of my own alone, with space for at least a dog and possibly a cat or two and of course plenty of plants. But lately I’ve found myself too tired to take action and push towards my gentle ‘boring’ dreams, for even they feel too far to grasp and the mountains have gotten too lofty to climb and I’m finding myself battling with wanting to ‘be’ and ‘achieve’ versus slipping into quiet mundanity and slipping out of view – heck, I even sat and debating shutting down this corner of the internet finally.

I desperately miss the starry eyed girl I was in my teen years and early twenties. Colourful and risk taking, I would find myself down alleyways in London leading to secret coffee shops, camera in hand ready to talk to the baristas for an hour or two in between writing or sketching. I used to traipse around east London in search of the most obscure vintage shops circa 2012, rooting around for the best deals before bus-ing it home, Crystal Castles leaking from my headphones. I was so excited for the world and what the world would offer, with dreams of a gentle love story that unravels into marriage, the house, the kids, the rose tinted life. So after leaving another date in which the waitress met my eyes and frowned, I found myself gazing out into the vast black night that rolled around outside of the train and sighed realising that I had indeed missed the boat as it were, (or that the boats left in the sea were not the type of ships most women in their thirties would want to board…) and I saw the picket fence, the love, the kids fade into the night as quickly as the last shreds of libido left in my body begin to evaporate. I delete Hinge once again and singe into my memory that if I redownload the app, I will be asked out by a man who seems objectively nice and then after a bit of talking, I will spend two hours excitedly getting ready, spritzing MFK’s Oud Satin Mood all over myself for good measure, stand in front of my sister who exclaims – ‘you look beautiful!’, drink two drinks and have a little food with a man met on the internet and then split the bill that comes to a total of £30-something for two.  I realise again that this arena is simply not for me.

I held onto my dreams like they were fully formed tactile things, but I now realise I was simply balling my fists and my dreams had slipped out of my hand like dandelion petals and drifted up and up and up until finally they were out of sight and all I was left with were hands and wrists worn from decades of holding on, holding out and waiting. Learning to let go has been… extremely difficult and probably one of the most complex and uncomfortable feelings I’ve had to wrestle with. It is complex type of grief, loss of the person you were versus the loss of the person you thought you would be, and how strange the six year old version of me feels. But in this letting go I find a sense of peace and a soft alleviation – almost a ‘whoosh’ of relief that in actuality, we don’t have to keep pushing and maybe it is okay to bask in the mundane for a while, forever, for life – I’m not sure whether I’ll pick up my proverbial sandals in the future again, but for now I’ve settled down on this peak and will observe whether I find myself climbing again.