Of Dreams and Doubt By Maryssa Dennis
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” ― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
When my younger brother was six, he wanted to be a construction worker. So he memorized every type of construction equipment in existence. When we went driving, he’d point out the window and name every machine he saw: Front-end loader. Backhoe. Cherry picker. Bulldozer. He watched Bob the Builder nonstop, which was bad enough, but he also frequently watched a movie called I Love Big Machines, which was as painfully dull as it sounds. He spent much of his time in the backyard with his “diggers,” carving out a large scar on our lawn that we affectionately called “Max’s Construction Zone.” When he was eight, he wanted to be a train engineer. He played with model trains all day, building and re-building long, winding tracks all over the house. He watched The Polar Express so many times that even now, I cringe at the mention of it. For hours, he sat in front of the computer playing with an exquisitely boring train simulator, learning all the knobs and handles and gauges so that he could someday take the controls of his own locomotive. Max never considered the possibility of failure. Doubt was a foreign concept. He did not need permission or confirmation to follow his dreams; he simply pressed forward with complete faith that everything else would fall into place behind him. He created his own reality as he went, building the world with his own two hands out of Lego bricks and Play-Doh. For him, like for most children, a dream was not a wistful aspiration but a fact in future tense.
When Max was little, we found this ambition endearing. We smiled and told him the sky was the limit. But soon we thought he was getting too old to believe that he could do such unrealistic things. Eventually, he’d have to discover life as it really was, and if his head was too high in the clouds, the crash back down to earth would break him. So we saw fit to inform him how the world really works—out of compassion, with concern, in the name of “growing up.” When he was eleven, he wanted to be a Navy Seal. We told him that being a Seal requires pique physical condition and extensive training and that the idea was probably not realistic. When I asked him about it again, he said, “I don’t think I can be a Navy Seal anymore.” I wish we wouldn’t have said a word. I remember myself when I was Max’s age. I was just as adamant as he about what I was going to be when I grew up, but my goal stayed the same throughout the years. I was going to be a writer. Ever since my mother taught me to read at age four, I was hooked. I started with picture books and quickly moved to chapter books and then middle grade novels and beyond. When I was six, I read Harry Potter for the first time. I devoured books from the shelves of my school library. I inhaled them. They were my sustenance. With this newfound hunger for the written word came a natural desire to inscribe my own fantastic stories. And so I began to write. My stories were clumsy and childish, but I wrote them nonetheless. After a while, my determination began to fade like a dying star. Even now, I still want to be an author, but the wish has gone stale over the years. I’ve stuck my dream in a dusty drawer with a million other mementos that I can’t seem to throw it away. For the sake of sentimentality,
I tuck it away in a scrapbook of lost things, knowing that it will never amount to anything but a beautiful idea. Sometimes I pull out my filing cabinet of regrets and linger over this one in particular, wondering why I ever let myself give up. The excuses flow readily and abundantly: Writing is not a stable career. I don’t have any good ideas. It’s too hard. I don’t have time to write. These are all lies, of course. If I stopped scrolling pointlessly through Facebook and binge-watching T. V. shows with no plot, I would absolutely have time to write. It wouldn’t be hard if I made it a habit. I would have good ideas if I stopped waiting for a bolt of inspiration to strike me and instead just did something. The truth is not that I don’t have the time or means to write but that I don’t have the heart for it anymore. When I was young, I made time for my dreams because I believed in them. But as I got older, I had to trade in my princess tiara for a bitter dose of “realism,” which is really just a veiled term for doubt—the unfortunate byproduct that comes with the upgrade package to adulthood. Too often, a side effect of growing up is building a wall in our minds to separate ourselves from our fantasies, our “unrealistic” goals. We choose to stick to the safe, the expected, because that’s what’s achievable, or at least what we think is achievable At one time, I believed in once upon a times and happily ever afters with all my heart. Eventually, I extinguished my belief in fairy tales and wishing stars like the small flame of a candle—snuffed out but still smoking, with the scent and the memory of the fire still lingering in the air. I thought that this is what it meant to grow up—to dig a grave for my dreams and lay them down to rest. The apostle Paul said, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (1 Cor 13:11). What a shame that the “childish things” we so often see fit to “put away” are the most admirable
characteristics of the human condition. Now, innocence is naïve, wonder is infantile, dreams are foolish. We are the victims of our own insecurity. We are blindfolded by doubt, tattooed by fear. The possibility of failure hangs over our heads like a cloud. We have nailed ourselves to the cross of our own resignation. This is not the future I want for my little brother. I want to believe Eleanor Roosevelt’s declaration that “the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” I want him to cling to the mottoes of Walt Disney—“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them,” and, “If you can dream it, you can do it.” I want him to rise without the weight of failure pressing on his shoulders, to live on his own terms like he used to. I want him to grow up but stay young at heart. Because why does growing up have to mean growing old?