what they don’t tell you about chasing your dreams

I started my new job two week ago, and it’s been a really tumultuous start to my year.

I used to work in a very flexible job that didn’t have constrained hours and was mostly remote. I got laid off suddenly last year and had to quickly do a massive career switch because being “picky” about my next job would mean putting myself in a lot of financial distress if I couldn’t find a match.

Now moving into a new corporate working situation with higher stakes and expectations, I was really miserable because my mind and body struggled to adapt to this new way of being. I was plagued with thoughts like… I’m not cut out for this. I hate the corporate world. Maybe I should have gone for a less stressful, lower paying job. The slow, pressure cooker drawl of being in a world that values capitalistic pursuits weighed so heavy on my mind that I started to wonder if this was going to be what the rest of my life looked like. It was discouraging, because just a couple of months ago I had a lot of hope for the direction of my small business and creative journey. Now, as I begin my new work life, I felt like my dreams could only become an after thought.

To be just a little dramatic, in my first week at work I felt like “my life ends here”. I no longer had the energy to brain storm new art pieces, or to think about the next exciting content I could put out for my community. For this entire week, it was almost as if I was throwing myself a pity party of what could or should have been. I wondered if I was being ungrateful, especially when landing a job in this terrible economy is a massive privilege.

But rather than invalidating my struggle, I allowed myself to sit with these feelings before figuring out how I wanted to move forward.

I think many people, if not most of the labouring population are like me in this regard. Everyone has something else they’d much rather be doing with their lives than capitalistic labour. I knew I had to reorient the way I thought, because I was hellbent to find a way out of the dichotomous ‘money or meaning’ hole I’ve dug for myself. The truth is, not many of us come from privilege to be able to pursue our dreams without financial, social, or career risk. I jumped so quickly into believing that a full-time corporate job meant I can’t continue to impact meaning on myself and others through my creativity. But it doesn’t help if I look at envisioning the life I want to live as separate from my actual reality.

What they don’t tell you about chasing your dreams is that you’ll never really reach it, and I think that’s where so many of us find ourselves frustrated, anxious and disappointed. Chasing your dreams can mean many different things to people - be it a lesser taken path of starting your own craft business, or climbing the corporate ladder to achieve financial independence early. I think it’s fundamentally all the same at the end of the day no matter what we envision our end points to be. That, however, is usually where we start to feel ourselves crumble. Chasing your dreams as a form of “end point” means that we tag our definition of success and happiness to a vaguely tangible finish line. It doesn’t work, because we forget to cherish the process and present in pursuit of a goalpost that always, always shifts. Imagine running a race and just when you feel you’re so close to the finishing line, you’re told that you’re still nowhere near.

I’ve spent most of my life living like this. Setting standards and expectations for myself in all areas of my life - even practicing mindfulness, I’d pressure myself to achieve an ideal state of mindful being. In this process, I lose sight of what matters most. The joy of learning a new skill, the comfort of a friend’s words after a horrible day, the growth and resilience I develop from a hardship. It was a hard thing to acknowledge initially, but I now know one thing: Good and bad times will come and go, so the only thing we can do is to find courage and peace in all things now. Not later, when we’ve “achieved something”. But now.

My days at work still feel like an endless drawl, and I still believe this way of work is not for me. But what I can do for myself now is to acknowledge the empowering realisation that at the end of the day, I am in charge of how I choose to frame my day. Today as I finish writing up this post, I am breathing through the understanding that I am where I am now for a reason, and because of that, life is good enough for now.

That doesn’t mean it can’t change. It just means that I choose to find the elusive purpose behind my corporate work. I don’t have to force myself to find my day job meaningful - it often isn’t for most. But it does serve me by equipping me with the experiences and tools (such as soft skills and financial stability) to set a groundwork for pursuing my passion. It is a momentary point in my life that nudges me towards wherever I feel aligns better. That’s valuable, and that’s good enough for now.

Seeing that phases of our lives are just that, phases, and not permanent fixtures and a condemnation, is giving me the strength to continue working towards what I feel is important.

During this time, radical gentleness and self-care has never been more important to me. So I hope that whatever life journey you’re currently on, that you practice gentleness by knowing it’s okay to feel disconnected and frustrated if you don’t feel that you are wherever you want to be.

At the end of the day, I think that it is the discovery of happiness and calm in the now that I’ve found outweighs the anxieties of an endless chase for a “dream”. It also inspires more meaningful action instead of the crippling resignation we often find ourselves in. When you zoom out into a bigger picture of where you are at, where you used to be, and where you are headed, you’ll realise that in the process of working towards the life you want to live, you’re already living the dream.

With all my love,
Luna