Death changes you. It changes everything, forever. Whether it is that of a parent, or a child, or of a close friend or family member, once that person is gone you are never the same. What I want to discuss is a different type of death, but one that will nonetheless change your life and your perspective forever.
What I am referring to here is the death of a dream.
This type of death may sneak up on you. It is like a cancer that has been growing inside your body for months or years and suddenly appears. One day you thought you were fine and the next you realize you’re not.
Or it can be a death that occurs when you let go of the dream you once held close in your heart and in the recesses of your mind. All at once you detach yourself from your dream and allow it to float away, like a butterfly released from an enclosed space who is now free to flap its wings and explore the world it has been waiting for and anticipating for as long as it can remember . You can almost feel and hear the movement in slow motion, tiny wings causing a hollow flutter as your dream literally flies out the window.
I observe this type of death in the clients I work with in my business. They come to me with big dreams and goals and I take them by the hand to help them turn their dreams into reality. Then the fear steps forward from their inner consciousness, choking the breath out of their lungs and convincing them they will not be able to achieve what they most want to accomplish.
Fear is its own form of cancer; false evidence appearing real, a slimy salesperson peddling defective wares to you, the buyer, letting your guard down. Buyer beware.
My clients reluctantly and subconsciously release their dream one piece at a time. Their writing comes to an abrupt halt. The project they were so excited about when they first came to me is put on the back burner. The email messages to their community become more impersonal and infrequent and then stop altogether. They withdraw from the world they have created for their business and retreat to the familiar. They have detached from the dream that once upon a time gave them a reason to feel alive, sometimes after years or decades of going through the motions. Too scary to keep moving forward, or so it appears.
If they could only step back to that time in the past when they allowed their mind and soul to detach, as if unhooking a latch and letting the pet hamster run down the hall. Not so simple to recover when the hamster makes its way into the closet.
Once in awhile there will be a new blog post or a social media update. But the spark is gone and the message falls flat. They would be the first to admit they are no longer living up to the potential they know is inside of them. The work now is a dispassionate, last ditch effort to stay afloat. The fear is winning.
My first dream was to become a writer. It began while I was still in grade school and grew as I went through high school and started college. But I couldn’t seem to get a grip on it and the fear made short work of my dream before it could manifest. It was as though I had turned and faced the fear and willingly handed over my portfolio of writing projects, some better than others, most only partially completed, all with a piece of my heart hidden deep in the words. My words, based on my life, a life I so wanted to live to its fullest. How could I let it slip away so easily?
“Here you go, fear. Take my life’s work and have your way with it. I am not deserving of anything more.”
I would make some effort while I was taking a writing course or given an English assignment. But the believing that the writing wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t good enough, that I did not deserve it, that everyone else was smarter and more talented kept me from doing anything extra to make my writing stand out.
There were other dreams along the way. Each time I made excuses for not pursuing them, or for starting and then giving up. There would be time. This would change; that would be different; there was always tomorrow.
Eventually I sold my dream, selling out in the process. The year was 1981 and the price tag was $14,400 a year, payable in monthly installments by the corporate offices of Liberty Mutual Insurance. The six-week training was tolerable. The six month probationary period led to insomnia, anxiety, and bouts of crying for seemingly no reason. Co-workers persuaded me to use cocaine in the bathroom to make the time pass less consciously, but I persisted in resisting their invitations.
I purchased a desk calendar and held it up to the fluorescent ceiling lights for dramatic effect as I used a red crayon to mark off the end of each day. Another six months and I gave notice. The supervisor was concerned for my welfare.
“Where will you go, what will you do?”
I felt so sad for this man in his fifties whose entire working experience had consisted of pushing papers across the desk and rescheduling meetings into the future. Remembering now how I had quivered as he uttered those words. Where would he go and what would he do if this paper shuffling routine closed down?
Doing the minimum work required crushes the life out of any dream, slowly, like a building collapsing with people still inside. This has become known as “quiet quitting” and I’ve written about this phenomenon as well.
This occurred during the Northridge earthquake I went through in January of 1994. Police and other first responders drove past the Northridge Meadows apartment complex a dozen times between four-thirty-one and five that Monday morning before realizing it had been a three story building before the violent shaking pancaked it down to two. It was a slow death for sixteen residents as the upper floors collapsed onto the first floor. Neighbors were helpless and will forever remember the sounds of those trapped beneath the debris.
I was a classroom teacher at that time. I had dreams of what I could accomplish with my students. An idealist sandwiched in between a world filled with pragmatists and bullies, and every day allowing the hope to fade away and the dream to die. Afraid to do more. Afraid to say too much. Afraid to the point that I facilitated the death of my own dreams with each passing day.
My students were young and eager to conquer the world. We began every day in believing we could do anything. But gradually the new car smell wore off and we were left with the stench of rotting flesh and a vision of gangrene limbs dangling in the open lot behind the recess yard. Victims of fear grabbing hold tightly; fighting back at first and then letting go. Young dreams are perhaps the most painful to watch die because they have not yet had the opportunity to sprout wings that can carry them away from the hallways of academia and into the open space of the vast unknown that holds such promise.
Recently I calculated that during only five of my twenty years as a teacher did I go above and beyond to make my students’ experiences the best they could be. My first year I wrote and received a grant and received three computers for my classroom. I brought two of my old ones from home and created a mini-lab. This was almost unheard of in the United States at that time – 1986.
It would be another five years before I was willing to put myself out there again. Then a decade would pass before I would come into my own, push through the fear, and once again make a difference for my students. So many years and so many students, all looking to me to do something they could not imagine or verbalize or request. Then needed a fearless leader and I did not show up for them very often. I had chosen the path of least resistance to get through each day and bury fear’s ugly head for another twenty-four hours. I was capable of so much more and will spend the remainder of my life making it up to other children, to adults, and to myself as well.
The good news is that most dreams can be resurrected. Brought back to life, dreams that are gently resuscitated, restored, and renewed breathe new hope into your heart and mind.
I revitalized my dream of becoming a writer. It had been almost forty years after I wrote and read aloud my first short story in the fifth grade. I had suffered needlessly during all of those years in between. Once I changed my thinking and my belief system I knew that I could be unstoppable as a writer. Today, more than a million published words later I am in the process of becoming the person I had always wanted to be.
We cannot go back in time to change what we did or did not do. There are no do-overs for words not said out loud, mistakes that could have been rectified on the spot, art exhibits opened yet never seen. Today is day one of the rest of your life. You are older and wiser now. There are more people to help and to serve, a perpetual stream of people in need.
What is your dream? Say it out loud. Again, like you mean it this time. Louder, so they can hear you two street over. What are you going to do to turn your dream into your reality? Yes, now. No, don’t listen to that little voice rising up inside you right now. You can do it. You are worthy. You deserve it. The world needs it and needs you. Only you can deliver your message in the way you always intended it to be shared.
We are all works in progress. Please don’t allow your dream to die while it is still alive inside of you. Reach for your full potential and then grab hold of it and don’t let go for love or money. Nothing needs to be explained to anyone. You do not need to justify or understand what you are doing. Move forward with love and hope in your heart, knowing that anything and everything is possible. Feel the fear, push through it with all of your might, and find out what it’s like on the other side.
I’m Connie Ragen Green…author, dreamer, and idealist. Living each day to its fullest and helping entrepreneurs and authors to achieve their wildest dreams.
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