When I was growing up, I never heard the adults around me speaking in future tense. Everyone around me seemed too busy coping with their past or simply surviving the present. My parents in particular, spent almost all their waking hours working to keep food on the table, a roof over our heads, and clothes on our backs. When they weren’t doing that, they slept, they fought, they cried, they yelled, and sometimes worse.
My whole childhood felt like running from one crisis right into the next. There was never any time to think about the future. There was nothing to do but deal with what was in front of you.
Even as early as elementary school, I lost the ability to imagine who I could be someday. I remember being sent home with assignments asking us to dream up who we wanted to be when we grew up. I can’t even remember what I must have written down. Perhaps I drew an astronaut; I was always interested in space. Maybe I drew a veterinarian. I did love animals. Whatever I drew, it was a lie. I didn’t dream of being anything.
Even as a teenager, I could not see past the very immediate. Many of the crises I had lived through by then had rooted in me and become internal. I spent years just trying to find my footing in life, trying to live. I couldn’t see past turning 18 years old. After I turned 18, I couldn’t see past 21. After 21, I found some stability, but couldn’t move my mind further than life up to 25. Every year since has felt like a surprise, a gift, a few of them a curse.
It isn’t that I thought I wouldn’t be around all that time, although that was certainly within the realm of possibility, I simply never thought I would be one thing or another. For me there was, and still is, a great sense of indifference, a gaping hole of simply nothing, where my image of the future should be. I might be something, or something else, or nothing at all, but it just won’t be up to me. Dreaming is a waste of time.
The future feels like something that will happen to me, not something I can shape. Sure, I can make small choices—what to eat for lunch, what to say, whether to write, when to go to bed—but big things—the job I will have, what kind of home I can afford, how long I will live, whether I am loved or note—just don’t feel like they are up to me. It’s chance, or luck if you prefer that. I don’t dream, I simply do.
I have managed to stumble into a decent life. I have a wonderful wife, a nice home, good friends, a fulfilling job, and many small comforts, but I don’t feel like I’ve earned any of it. The best I have been able to do is create the best present possible at all times. Each moment stands alone for me and I make the best I can of it.
And that has worked for me, so far, but lately, I have begun to feel a shift in my thinking. I’ve started to wonder if this foreshortened way of seeing time hasn’t been a truth I know, but a way of simply surviving I should have let go of a long time ago. My perceptions are skewed. There’s more to life than now, or there should be…there could be.
Going through life on autopilot is a perfectly fine way to live if you want, but it’s not so easy to do when it’s not just your life you’re living, but I share my life. Being married means sharing certain passions, goals, and desires. You dream alone and then you dream together. Except, I have never been very good at dreaming.
To dream, you have to feel safe. I spent some of the most important years of my development feeling very unsafe. That was all a very long time ago, but trauma can be so ingrained that it becomes reality. It is the lens you view everything through and then suddenly even the lens is invisible.
We often forget that what happens inside our minds is unique to each of us, and that there are a nearly infinite number of ways to be. We can have the wrong idea. We can limit ourselves without even knowing it. Most importantly, we can change. What you were taught—about who you are, about what you deserve, about the way the world works—when you were growing up isn’t the one and only truth. For many of us, what we were taught were lies we have to work hard to disbelieve.
To dream, you have to be able to let go of the fear of failing, of hurting, of dying, and you have to believe you can make things happen and not that things can only ever happen to you. To dream, you have to love yourself now. To dream, you have to believe you deserve more than what the world gives you. To dream, you have to know you will be here in a year, in five years, in ten. You have to close your eyes and see yourself there and you have to love that version of you, too.
It’s taken my whole life until now to know I have not just agency, but responsibility to myself and the people I love to reach higher. I can do more than just be a good wife, daughter, sister, friend, human being. I can work toward something, earn something, and be something in the world, too. I can think of my future self and wonder at what she wants, what her life could look like, and I can plan how to get there.
Lisa Marie Blair 