Confessions of a dreamer turned opportunist
For many a job in the creative field, be it photography, screenwriting or clay animation, is the dream. Earnestly chasing THE dream, and then having the success story featured in a chic online publication--possibly the height of accomplishment. In the social media age, the odds of succeeding are greater than they’ve ever been. The experts and the creative are the winners in this media-crazed society of ours, the nine-to-fivers ambitionless slacks.
My dream has been to write. In my wildest daydreams I saw myself sitting in a neighborhood café, sipping on a double shot Americano while drawing up an article from my recent trip to Greenland. In my slightly more moderate dreams, I imagined myself walking into a grocery store and picking up dinner, knowing that my words had paid for every item in the basket.
Last fall my dream became a reality. I was ecstatic.
“What do you do?” someone would ask me.
“I write,” I’d answers with shivers of excitement running all the way down to my toes.
For my first paid article I interviewed two café-owners. These ladies, a food-journalist and a photographer, had changed career paths in their fifties and now ran a stylish neighborhood café that smelled of homemade bread and locally roasted coffee. Naturally, I assumed opening a place with such a cozy feel must have been a realization of a lifelong dream, but when I inquired about it, the answer was a resounding “no”.
“It was never our dream to own a café,” they told me.
“So many people make the mistake of following a dream,” one began.
“And then two years down the line they give up, because running a café is rarely about pouring coffee in a frilly apron,” the other finished the sentence.
Following a dream is a mistake? Never! I thought, as I was still high on my own dream’s fruition into reality. But didn’t take long for reality to crash full-steam (and quite mercilessly) into my pink-hued daydreams.
Before, my words were free. I wrote when inspiration struck and never steered far from familiar topics. There was time to mold sentences into all sort of funky shapes, to play with the clay. But when I began to writing for a living, every word became heavy with expectation to please other people enough for me to have at least two-digit numbers on my bank account. What’s more, I was no longer the determiner of my own subject matter.
Instead of the pretty little café of my daydreams, I found myself downing a second beer at eleven o’clock on a Monday night, frantically trying to finish a seven-page article for the following morning. Or desperately dialing and re-dialing the number of an overloaded CEO, “I just need thirty minutes of your day, please sir!” Words, my favorite creative outlet, became a product I was responsible for delivering on a tight schedule. A dissonance settles in when a cherished art form becomes a source of income.
The comfort is that with experience the burden to deliver weighs a little less. But the collision of my dreams with reality knocked the rose-colored glasses right off my nose. A dream is by definition something unattainable, a perfected image. There might be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but more of than not, all you find is a cow, apathetically munching on tuffs of grass. A creative job is still just another job. Like any other job it’s going to feel like hard work, and it’s bound to suck balls from time to time. The cover stories that worshipfully endorse the contemporary ethos of living on a passion often fail to include recounts of how those dark bags found a permanent place under the eyes. That’s a shame, because the glorification of creative jobs leads to tunnel vision. And so, viable job opportunities, where one’s talents would be put to good use, can easily pass by. Some passions and creative endeavors are too precious and serve better purposes than that of paying the bills. They are worthwhile even without the price tag.
I’m going to keep writing, because I feel this chapter of my life still has something to offer. I want to see what’s on the next page (and also, starving is really not my thing). Come summer I’ll have time for words that are mine alone and that’s a thrilling thought. But in terms of the distant future, nothing is set in stone anymore. The glasses have come off and I’m ready to grab hold of any opportunity that comes my way, even if it never featured in lengthy Dreamworks production. I like embracing reality, and when life asks me what it is that I want, I say, “I’m not sure, surprise me”.
