What if your dreams don't end up as expected...

I'm not sure it's ever possible to know that we'll always want what we want now, any more than it's possible to know that we'll get everything we want. I don't think it's wasted, either, it's just living your life. Thems my two coppers. Good luck!

I was in a similar situation. In retrospect, I am SO glad I gave up on my first dream, because it allowed me to devote myself to a second one that was actually closer to my heart. Will that second dream end up making me happy? I don't know, maybe not, but the journey is worth it this time.

As I age, I've started to value excitement and engagement over happiness per se -- which is great, but tends to come in isolated bursts for me. What I care most about is having something to look forward to.

In high school, I dreamed of getting admitted to a certain college, going to a prestigious grad school, and becoming an academic like my dad while doing my creative writing on the side. The dream college? Check. The dream grad school with a great fellowship? Check. But then it came time to get the job, and suddenly I couldn't check the box. The humanities job market was flooded and crashing. Nobody had informed me that my specialty wasn't one, and hence was unmarketable (something I should have figured out by myself). I had interview after interview at great schools, and rejection after rejection.

I spent a while "mourning" my dream career. I took adjunct teaching jobs at ridiculous wages. Then a fulltime temporary position in a city I hated. If I'd stayed in that job, I could have become a tenure-track prof, but all of a sudden I just couldn't do it anymore. I quit and returned to the city where I wanted to be.

People in academia had told me horror stories about the unemployability of humanities PhDs in the "real world," so I was terrified. I took freelance work. Went to a temp agency, learned to touch-type.

Then I figured out something: my editing skills, which got in my way when I was teaching (because I wanted to correct every single flaw in students' papers), had actual value in the "real world." I did freelance copy editing and eventually got my current fulltime job as a newspaper editor. Which is incredibly stressful, but also way more stimulating and exciting than academia ever was for me.

Meanwhile, I kept writing and querying, for years and years -- until, after having dreamt about being published since I was a kid, I finally found myself approaching that goal.

Will this come with all sorts of new problems? Will I have a tough time adding a new career of sorts to my current one? I'm sure-- I'm also a negative thinker, and I see the worst-case scenarios coming a mile away.

And do I regret all that time I "wasted" on my first path? Honestly, kind of. I don't regret my studies or the books I read, which still inform my writing and thinking, but I wish I'd plunged into writing straight out of college instead of taking a path I thought was more prestigious and "realistic" (which it turned out not to be). I see now that life is short and you can't try to do everything.

OTOH, I think there's something to be said for having varied life experience and getting different points of view. My academic advisors would probably be shocked and disgusted if they could see the writing I'm doing now, just as my employers and my agent might be bored to tears by my academic writing. But I like that I've been all those different people and experimented with those different styles and approaches. When it comes to avoiding boredom, I've been very lucky indeed.

Good luck in your new path! Whatever it may bring, I think you'll find it will at least be different and teach you something. Hopefully it will bring you a lot of joy, as well.

lottarobyn said:

They nearly had me convinced I was making a huge mistake by "giving up so early." But wait - six years is early, Mom? No. I figure any change at this point is positive.

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While I don't know your particular situation, I tend to agree. After six years in a position, if you're not happy, you should listen to your gut.

Stability and security are great (and hard to come by these days), but no substitute for feeling good day to day. And I don't think you have to worry about planning for ten years ahead — nobody can be sure who they'll be in ten years. (Of course, when/if you have kids and/or a mortgage, you know you'll still have certain responsibilities to fulfill then. But most other things are uncertain.)

My plans did not include high school dropout. I was going to be a veterinarian. In attempting to stay alive, I had to abandon absolutely everything. Decades went by where I just sat in the ship and allowed life to steer it. I'm not a vet...my biggest dream is now almost laughable. As the drag-queeny Boy sang, "Dreams are made of emotion." Abandoning my dream is something that I didn't reflect on and decide, but something that HAPPENED to me. I'm good with that. I'm alive. I'm a father and a grandfather. I'm a writer...that rocks. Sometimes the dreams we have are not who we are at all. Either the dreams are denied us, or we take turns away from them that make them seem irrelevant to our newly shaped hearts. Doesn't matter how we choose them or lose them, really. The thing to do is simply go with the flow. Go where your CURRENT dream takes you. I stopped mapping life out YEARS AND YEARS AGO. To map life is to go on the Ferris wheel. To allow what-may-come to happen is to board the roller coaster (borrowed and paraphrased from the movie Parenthood). The Ferris wheel is great...but it just keeps going around and around. The roller coaster? Now there's the fun...

lottarobyn said:

Next summer - six years later - I'll leave the organization.

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Nothing is wasted. Good to hear that you have the courage to change, by the way. Others would have simply stayed in the position for 35 years and put their head down. Courage is a great conqueror of lost interest in dreams.

I think you should consider yourself very fortunate. Many, if not most, people never truly come to grips with their destiny, and live lives in little boxes, never opening up that door and taking a peek outside. Doesn't mean they're not satisfied or even happy. Just means they didn't test the waters even in the absence of sharks.

I firmly believe every experience fortifies you in some way. Whether it confirms what you like or reinforces what you don't. Take those experiences and keep them in your back pocket while you journey on. Someday, you'll need a reminder why you've chosen your particular path.

I actually know exactly how you feel. I just made the really difficult decision to quit my PhD programme after 2 1/2 years of work on it.

Why? because I realised that academia was definitely not working for me as a career choice, that it was a lifestyle not a job and that I needed to do something that made me happier in the long term. I really, really struggled with the idea that I was going to quit. It had become such a part of my identity, that not teaching seemed really foreign to me.

I expected to be really heartbroken when I quit, but actually I feel really liberated and excited to try new industries. I haven't felt excited about what I'm doing in a really long time and it's deeply affected my mental/physical health.

What end do you want? Dreaming about an end that's fantasy destroys a lot of people. It's the journey that has to satisfy you, not the end of the journey.

Now, I don't believe for a second that anyone in this country has to give any dream, or can't have the sunniest possible future, unless they're paralyzed from the neck up, but if you're living for teh end, rather than loving the journey, you're begging for failure and disappointment.

None of us has a clue what the end result will be, or even how it will feel if everything goes our way, so living for that is just self-defeating. One rule for happy, successful people, whether in business or art, is to find something to do that you love doing right now, and will continue to love doing without regard to some future, fantastical ending.

The idea is to be where you want to be in the here and now, not being where you want to be only after you climb some mountain. You have to be happy today, not ten years from now. This doesn't mean you can dream of winning a Nobel Prize, or a gold medal at the next Olympics, or a bazillion dollars with a lottery ticket.

It just means that if happiness, success, and enjoyment depend on that future goal, you have already lost.

lottarobyn, I went through something with similar repercussions. I put all my heart and soul into one direction. It satisfied part of my personality, but it also suffocated part. It required that I be very diligent with my time and energy. To do it well, I had to close myself off to writing (and for a while, even reading and movie watching) because all of those emotional, artistic things tended to take over my brain, rendering me unreliable.

I did that for about fifteen years, and half of me was truly happy. I was raising kids and finding joy in that, I had friends traveling a similar journey, it was a decent life. But I was also disappointed by people I'd trusted, and it was then that I realized I was letting other people and their agendas (however good) influence me too much. I was also homeschooling and I slowly realized that's like swimming upstream for me -- too extroverted. For a while I embraced all the challenges, and then I realized I was miserable. Because I wasn't being true to myself. I didn't get it for a long, long time, but I am so different from the people around me because I'm an artist at heart. Once I understood that, I could ignore all the other noise I'd let into my life and follow 'my own drummer.' I'm so much happier.

I echo Fuchsia. You realize at some point that life is too short, and you can't do everything. Writing was my lifelong dream and I decided to embrace it rather than postpone it any longer. Finally my kids are all in school and doing well and I get to write a few hours most days. It's heaven. I don't regret all the years, but I do regret some.

Here's a quote from one of the last letters written by Steven Sotl0ff, the journalist who was recently beheaded by the Isl@mic St@te:

"Everyone has two lives; the second one begins when you realize you only have one."

I too need goals to strive for. I also agree with Jamesaritchie that you need to enjoy the journey. Balance is key.


oceansoul, my dad also quit his PhD program after nearly completely it. That was in the 1970s and his field dried up overnight (Philosophy). He already had three kids when this occurred, so he was sweating it. But he also didn't love teaching it turned out. He found his dream job a few years later: computer programming - back when you only needed a few classes to get a job. Good luck on your new path!

Something loss has taught me is that sometimes (most of the time) things don't go according to plan. But what works out can be better than anything you could have ever even imagined.

I was in a somewhat similar position, although I wouldn't say that my first job was my dream--but it was something that took a LOT of time and effort, and I had hoped to feel like it was a good fit. But it wasn't. I resigned my commission at the first chance I had.

I've just started a new job. Also not a dream, exactly, but something that I think I could enjoy and be good at. Along with all the new job jitters, I've been battling the feeling that perhaps I was too hasty. And that many of the things I disliked about the first job weren't particular to that job but are just facets of having any full-time job/career. It's troubling, because you start to wonder, am I just going to quit this when I can't take it anymore? And go where? Start again? Starting a new career path every 5 years isn't really a tenable plan.

So for me, I just don't focus on the end goal. I don't think about getting promoted and where I might be in five or ten years. Maybe someday I can build that long-term plan, but for now it just stresses me out. So instead I focus on today, on this week, on the brief I'm making and the tasks I need to get done. And one day I'll probably look around me and realize I've made it a lot farther than I ever thought!

But like I said, my career choices aren't really based on dreams. Honestly the only real, true dream I've held in my life is being a writer, and I can't seem to make any progress on that, so what do I know?

lottarobyn said:

Thanks for sharing, everyone - it's definitely a comfort to know what I'm experiencing isn't all that unusual.

I agree about enjoying the journey, but I'd like to get satisfaction not only from the road, but from whatever the road leads toward. I probably need to work on not being so chained to the future, though.

Part of my decision for the change is tied to the realization (and acceptance) of having a finite amount of this lifetime. I've gone past the period of youth where it seems like you'll live forever and you have vast oceans of time to play and figure things out. There is still some time, but it's more like a lake than an ocean. I don't want to wake up one day to find the lake's dried up and I'd barely made any attempt to swim across because I was too comfortable with my feet touching the bottom.

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I'm no spring chicken either. I re-discovered my love of writing after leaving a trail of career wreckage several times over. Heck, I don't know (with any reasonable degree of certainty) if I'll even wake up tomorrow. However, I know I sought something more than ordinary contentment. I followed a dream, and dreams, being what they are, don't necessarily fit in our neat little box of expectations.

If you had any idea how many times I've reinvented myself, well....just trust me on this one.

Go with what makes you smile.

lottarobyn said:

On the one hand, I'm excited for the new beginning next summer. But a constant nagging thought pops up - what if I start working toward something else only to find out after all the blood, sweat, and tears that it's another dead end?

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In my experience nothing is ever a dead end. I've had many career changes in my life and can tell you, every dream fulfilled always ends up in disillusionment, if only because the actual dream part of it, was really the journey not the end. Understanding that now, my constant mantra is...

It all means something.

This idea that we will find something that fulfills us completely is a big fat furphy. As we achieve each milestone we grow, and in growing we enlarge our capacity to achieve so what if your old dreams no longer fit?

If your dream is to be a published author, once you get there, you will probably move onto something else. Maybe your next dream will be to sell x number of copies, hit a bestseller list or similar. Human's are dynamic creatures and our capacity to dream neverends. It's not so much that your dream failed to deliver, its that you grew beyond it.

I know how you feel. When I left university I targeted a certain organization, it took me two years of applications and interviewing, but I finally cracked it last year. Then after six months, I was told they were combining two roles into one, and I would have to reapply for my job. I worked my ass off on the application, had a perfect interview, and never thought for a minute I wouldn't get the offer. When my boss said he had chosen my colleague I cried my eyes out for two days (still feel betrayed by the colleague who applied for my job.)

Anyway, I did get a job in another museum a few weeks later. This time last year I would never have imagined that I would be applying for teacher training (and can't imagine doing anything else.) There's a quote that comes to my mind: it's after our greatest defeats that come our greatest victories.

Bend with the wind.

I was in a somewhat similar situation. I quit a graduate program in biochemistry at Harvard to study music. At the time I was sure that music was IT for me. In the fullness of time I discovered that it was "almost it." Then circumstances led me to a freelance writing career, which turned out to be my "it."

It's hard to put into words, but there was a subtle difference in the way I viewed my musical and writing aspirations. With writing, I had more of a sense of "coming home." It seemed a more natural fit on many levels.

Twenty years later I still enjoy it as much as ever and have no desire to switch careers. I haven't realized all my writing ambitions yet, but I've had enough success and recognition to keep me going.

My point being -- if writing is your "it," you'll probably sense it fairly early on.

F.

Also had a kind of similar situation. I was convinced when I was in high school that I wanted to work in theatre or TV, went to a specialist school in London and graduated with a professional diploma, only to find that it was who you knew, not what you knew, and the college hadn't delivered on all its promises to help us network. I got a few temporary jobs here and there but nothing that looked like it could lead to anything. So I ended up just taking the first job I saw in "The Stage" newspaper that I thought I could do - guiding tours around London. I had never really been that into history and had to learn a lot to keep up with the other guides (that was when I first learned how nasty historians can be when they get into an argument!) but I found I loved the interaction with the public and helping people to have a good holiday.

I started doing walking tours of different areas of London and one of those was the kind of 'legal quarter', the Inns of Court in the City so I studied up on the English Legal System so I would know what I was talking about and could answer questions. I found I was getting quite interested in the law and so eventually, when the tour company got into a bit of financial trouble and it looked like I'd need to find work elsewhere, I thought about studying law. I'd had a lot of stick from my family about my original qualification not being a 'proper degree', so I thought that was a way to sort that.

So I moved up from London to Glasgow, where my great aunt had just died and her house now belonged to our family. I had to do an access course as it was a while since my original high school exams but I passed and I got into Glasgow University to do a law degree. Again I started to plan out my future and figure all the things I was going to do etc etc.

By about the end of first year I realised that interesting though I found the subject, law was not something I wanted to do as a career. I tried to talk to my parents about changing subjects and got screamed at, accused of being a total failure and unable to concentrate on anything and finish anything. So I stayed with it. Eventually by the end of third year I had to suspend for a year, as my mum got ill, and when I went back to try and pick up again the university decided to be crappy about my fees, even though the student funding agency had told them again and again that the money was there and all they had to do was claim it. By that point it was pretty clear my mum wasn't going to be with us for much longer, I hated the course and although I was passing I was going to be lucky to get a third, and so with the administrative crap they were giving me I just threw in the towel.

It is something I've regretted ever since and actually this is the first time I've really admitted to this because I felt ashamed at not having graduated. My family still don't know. But I see now in hindsight that it was the right choice for me. By sheer coincidence I helped out a neighbour and it turned out she worked for the local TV station. I was telling her my story without knowing this and she asked me if I wanted a job. That was ten years ago and I'm still there now. I've also had my two years in Prague which I loved, and where I used the experience from the tours and the love of history to get work there.

I do get a little jealous sometimes of people who know exactly what they want to do and follow that one career all their lives, but I'm trying not to compare myself to them and to accept that my path is unique to me, and whilst it's nice to have plans and ambitions, that I also need to accept that fate will often bat me somewhere else. Right now I haven't the faintest idea what I will do when I'm finished with the surgery and stuff that I'm getting (the reason I'm back in the UK), whether I'll go to Prague again or somewhere else. But that's exciting as well as frightening.

Whatever happens, lottarobyn, I hope you find happiness

When I was ten I wanted to be an astronaut - didn't happen.

When i was fifteen i wanted to be a rock star - didn't happen

When I was twenty I wanted to be a research scientist - didn't happen ( although i got close to that one )

When I was twenty five I wanted to run my own business - managed it for five years before the economy tanked and I had to retreat to a day job.

When I was thirty three I decided I wanted to be a writer and set in with a vengeance. The dream was the big deal-name in lights, book signings across the world, movie rights and jammy doughnuts for life.

I'm fifty six. The dream is still alive.

Personally, I believe that if you follow your dreams you will either reach it one day or find something equally good or even better along the way.
I think the worst thing is not following your heart and doing what you truly want. It is better to try and fail than to wake up one day and realize life has passed you by and you did none of the things you wanted.

good for you

Calla Lily said:

Tried to type this on my phone earlier and it went kaflooie.

Timeline of Lily's life decisions:
1979: Entered the convent
1982: Took vows
1983: Hauled my butt outta there.

It took me about 15 years to get past everything. I was positive I had a calling... and then I didn't. I survived it by getting up every morning and going through one more day. Over and over, every morning.

You can do this, lottarobyn. It takes time, but making your own life is very satisfying, if not easy.

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Good for you...keep going forward only...

IMO, dreams seldom work out. Best to be flexible as constant change is often the reality dream.