'I Killed All of My Dreams And I Have Nothing Left!'
Your dreams can't be murdered. You can pretend they don't exist, but they're still here, waiting for your sunshine, your water, your love.
On Avalon (1987), Dorothea Tanning
Dearest Polly,
I wrote to you about this some time ago, but reading your recent Ask Polly about dreams made me want to reach out again.
It was something you said about not listening to someone who has killed their dreams. I've had so, so many in the past ten plus years. Many of them I have accomplished in some form or another. Starting a small press for comics and artist books, completing my BFA, having an art studio, starting a band.
In a way, I felt super behind everyone, and there was so much I wanted to do. I put a lot of my energy for a long, long time into supporting these dreams while supporting myself. It wasn't easy! Actually, it was miserable! I was not taught many basic life skills let alone taught how to love yourself enough to let yourself have dreams or how to let your little baby heart dreams waddle into the world to be kicked down by rejection or just... how exhausting the day to day can be.
I was afraid, but I thought it was important so I really tried to let myself dream and to make them as real as possible for myself. Some projects got further than I thought they would, others didn't get as far as I had really wanted.
One by one, I let the dreams go to seed as my energy levels shrank more and more.
Right now, my capacity for dreaming is almost nothing. I'm recovering from surgery, and from the five years of turmoil the chronic condition which the surgery called for wrecked on my body and my brain and my heart. Recovering from two break ups from partners in two years, and the volatile ending of a close friendship right before them. From moving and taxes and pant sizes and shitty landlords and ingrown nails and parking tickets.
I know this isn't the fault of the dreams themselves, but it's like I was this infertile planter for years and years. Before I could work the soil and give it nutrients or time or space I crammed a lot of sunflower seeds in there and when those didn't grow I bought starters of vegetables and shoved those in there and when the squirrels ate those I turned it into a pond and when that was a rotting pot of water I tried wildflower seeds but those need stratification so only the grass grew and now I just have a pot of dirt on my balcony (several, actually).
Right now I just want to make it through the day without being in pain. Want to ride my bike again. I want to enjoy creativity, without pushing it into a project for public recognition. Somehow I'm actually really inspired right now, but I'm so tired and day to day life takes so much out of me, I can't be bothered to hold onto a dream for too long without seeing all the effort and time that I don't have will take me. My portable dream has become: Clear the clutter from my kitchen. Do a load of laundry. Acknowledge one beautiful millisecond before succumbing to dissociating through the rest of your day.
But something is missing! I miss art and singing. For so long I've been longing for that feeling of being tired and dirty after digging up your lawn in the heat and drinking a glass of water — creatively speaking. But whenever I try low pressure to start something, I just end up wanting to let it go again. Like I'm blasting weed killer onto everything that does crop up, knowing the ideas aren't the ones I want them to be, knowing that I won't be able to engage with or listen to them for an indefinite amount of time.
Am I a dream killer? Which of these dreams should I resuscitate? Which of them needed to wither up and die to make fertilizer for new dreams? And even if I can identify these, will I ever have the capacity to bring them into the world again? How do I get back on track?
Any and all advice is very welcome, thank you for your work!!!
DREAM KILLER
Dear DK,
No dream can be murdered, and no dream is ever completely abandoned. It lives inside your body. The question is: What kind of space are you offering it? Is it chained in some dungeon, weeping and yelling for help? Or did you make a warm bed for it inside your heart?
When I talk about embracing and relishing and enjoying and supporting your dreams, I’m not talking about pushing some goal towards a finish line. I’m talking, in part, about confronting the dark, moldy basement where you’ve stored all of your most passionate desires, romantic notions, creative impulses, and fanciful ideas about who you are – not who you could be with enough guitar lessons and hair extensions, not what you might make if you could focus, not where you might move if you were rich. Savoring your dreams means cleaning out the cobwebs in your dark basement and washing the floors and putting a daybed and an easel and a mood board and a fluff-encased bean bag down there. Embodying your dreams means walking through this green world with a straight spine, open eyes, a full heart, and feeling like a queen with eyes that burn like wildfires and hair so full and so long it fluffs out like a cloud behind you.
You probably aren’t in the mood for these words because you’re tired, frustrated, regretful, ashamed, and in pain. I just want you to start to walk into those dungeons and basements you carry around in your body, and ask yourself who told you that crossing finish lines or being recognized or earning money or growing into a faultless, regret-free, successful adult were the only ways to validate all of the energy and time you dedicated to creating beauty and joy. Your story doesn’t honor the reality of your life.
I want you to fill a bucket with warm water and soap and as the bucket fills, I want you to stick your hands into warm water and feel this moment. Will you clean the whole floor of the basement today? Will you unpack one box with old song lyrics stuffed inside it? Will you pull out your old sketchbooks, imagine a new comic, consider taking that oil painting class you’ve often longed for?
It doesn’t fucking matter. All that matters is that you put the bucket under the tap and the warm water comes out and the bubbles start to form and you stick your hands in the water and you think, “Today I’m going to wash a little of the basement floor.”
Reading these words and imagining hot water on your hands and understanding, at a cellular level, what it means to become a vocal patriot to your dreams is enough. When you place your body in alignment with who you are, what you can invent, what you can imagine, how you see the world, how the fresh breeze feels when it filters underneath your skin, you are partaking of, encountering, reckoning with, and even tasting the real rewards of your dreams, which are fully awake and alive inside you.
The real rewards are simply acknowledging that your dreams still exist, brightening up the place where you keep your dreams, opening a single box, looking at a single comic, and crying. The rewards are being here and feeling what’s real.
So many people, even successful ones, can’t do that part.
I’m not saying never finish anything, never promote anything. I’m saying our corrupt world tricks us into thinking that only popular, lucrative, widely praised work signals a dream that wasn’t crushed or abandoned. I’m saying our collapsed, broken world doesn’t teach us to nurture what we have and who we are, to relish what we can imagine and what we’re made of. So we are all full of wildly romantic dreams that we refuse to enjoy.
I type these words as I hobble along on a treadmill desk, wearing a knee brace, a little bit behind, needing to go walk two very excitable dogs through my mother’s swampy neighborhood on an already-hot morning before therapy. “Must be nice to go on an actual walk,” you’re thinking. But what I’m thinking is, “Imagine having started a small press for comics and artist books! Imagining having an art studio! Imagine starting a band with an actual drummer who shows up for practice regularly and not giving up after trying out two drummers and realizing drummers are flakes!”
Dreams aren’t flowers, they’re seeds. Some turn to flowers eventually and some don’t. Your life is field of seeds with some tiny blossoms sprouting, even now. You are much more capable of relishing that field and growing new flowers than you’ve ever been, trust me on that. You can take your time. But you have to start by looking at what you’ve already done — so many fruitful efforts, so much joy. Honor all of it.
Yesterday I started and didn’t finish an essay about how embracing your dreams always necessarily includes the dreams you’ve already embraced: the seeds, the flowers, the soil, the water, everything you’ve done before. My husband is a flower that still needs to be fed and watered – he represents a dream of mine that I’m so proud of, that I am aligned with, that I believe in, that I love like crazy. I dreamt that one person would understand me and show up for me, and he does so without fail. I dreamt that this person would make me laugh and help me through my shittiest days. My husband is such a big dream of mine that I feel vulnerable and inferior when I let him into the master bedroom of my heart, so sometimes I keep him in a tiny supply closet. Sometimes it’s painful to recognize how much I love him and depend on him. It makes me feel weak and small.
The more important a dream is to you — even a dream is in bloom — the more anxious and sad it has the power to make you. So listen up, motherfuckers! IT IS HARD TO HAVE DREAMS! Dreams are painful. But dreams — those that feel real and realized and those that feel undeveloped and abandoned alike – bring you life. They wake you up and make it possible to breath as deeply as you need to breathe. They make your body and heart and mind and spirit feel very, very good, but only when you refuse to shove them into the dark and pretend they don’t exist!
You haven’t failed. There are no failures on this planet. There are no wannabes in the universe. You either plant seeds or you pretend you don’t know what a seed is. You either love and smell your blossoms and water your trees or you chop down trees and declare that part of your life officially over. You either recognize yourself as the one queen with piercing eyes and flowing hair and a straight spine who is here to bless the trees, salute the sun, and cherish the sky, or you fixate on your brow lines and collapse into yourself and try to disappear. You either smell the honeysuckle and taste the sweat dripping off your forehead and know that you’re the one demon lover dragon sprite with the sheer force and joy and brilliance to do the exact work that you were built to do, or you succumb to the broken, corrosive, confused propaganda of dullards and scolds with their flat eyes glued to the marketplace, glued to screens showing military marches, glued to skin secrets and trade secrets and marketing secrets, the whole universe just a maze of secrets and hacks and ways to fuck each other out of a future.
You are not a dream killer. You’re a seed lover. You have planted seeds that made a difference, that gave you and your friends hope, that brought delight to this world in so many different forms. Your job now is to pull those incredible feats out and look at them, to feel the sadness and the glory of them without telling any old stories about what you fucked up, what you missed, what you didn’t complete. There are no failures. Open some old boxes and love yourself for putting your heart on the line.
Love yourself for putting your heart on the line.
Love your seeds. You can’t plant new seeds without loving the old ones, without celebrating the daring and courage it took for you to till some soil and plant. It was hard, wasn’t it? It was hard and you did it anyway.
You can do it again. Your only job is to understand this. It’s not about finishing or becoming a different kind of person. You can love what you are right now. You can stare at a tree and understand that you’re the one owner of the forest, the ocean, the air, the clouds, the universe. It’s not a fantasy. This isn’t escapism. It’s attuning yourself to what’s real instead of living inside your stories. It’s waking up to your heart instead of living inside your head. It’s honoring and respecting your body, including its failures and weaknesses and struggles to repair itself. It’s opening your eyes wider.
I understand how you feel. Please trust that. I am a fellow infertile planter filled with dank dirt sometimes. I have spent the last few years in a similar state. Please take my word for it. It’s inescapable and it’s okay. You cannot be a flower farm in June every day of your life. Yesterday I tried to write about fifteen different topics and I had started too late in the day because I wanted to walk the dogs with my older daughter. I haven’t seen much of her this summer so I wanted to walk allll the way to her favorite coffee place so she could drink her favorite coffee, even though the dogs don’t tolerate sitting outside cafés without getting anxious and barking at other dogs.
This time I was calm and they were calm and there was no barking. We sat in the cool morning air and I had an iced matcha with toasted coconut syrup and it wasn’t too sweet and I didn’t even have to ask for it to NOT BE TOO SWEET. There was another dog but my dogs did their best not to flip the fuck out. I talked to them in quiet tones. I sipped my matcha. I listened to my daughter tell me about her friends. She has so many friends, and she does not struggle with boundaries or big insecurities the way I did and sometimes still do. She is a flower in full bloom that still needs watering.
We walked home through the neighborhood where I grew up, now full of pride flags and resist flags, now full of wild gardens packed with zinnias and echinacea, and I felt so good. Then my daughter went to work and my knee hurt like a motherfucker and I slumped on my bed in my mom’s house and my writing wasn’t that good and I couldn’t finish a single thought or a train of thought or complete a sentence, and then I got a message that my fucking Google account is 98 percent full.
So I went looking for something to delete. What I found was one 40 MB attachment, a video of my daughter and her friends singing “It’s a Hard Knock Life” in their elementary school talent show. They were 8 or 9 years old at the time. I choreographed the entire performance, and it is a thing of true beauty. I should just throw it up online somewhere because you will not fucking believe how good it is. I mean, they sing at the top of their lungs! No one forgot their parts! There are solos and they’re all great! They form clusters, they gesture, they form kick lines, it’s incredible! These kids weren’t even in tune at first. I coached them to do all of that!
I wrote an essay several years ago (it’s in Foreverland) about trying to direct the same kids the next year and they were more self-conscious and they picked a terrible song and I got very bossy and they all hated me and the performance wasn’t that great. We all wanted to feel that magic again, together, and I felt like I failed them. I wrote about that because at the time, I preferred to write about failure. I believed that I was a failure on many levels. I believed, in some core, dark basement-like place in my body, that I was an imposter and a wannabe who got everything wrong.
And in the years since, one of those little girls died of a fentanyl overdose. We moved away and left that whole community behind, in part because I couldn’t handle the sadness and loss and my continued inability to make my life there exactly what I wanted it to be. I felt like a failure in that neighborhood, in that city. Too much of what I tried to do there had failed.
I cried my eyes out watching that video yesterday. That’s what it feels like to honor a dream, to move a dream from your dungeon to your master bedroom, to invite a close, difficult friend from your overheated garage to your dining room table, to move an old draft of a novel you finished and then hated from under your bed to the top of your desk, to mess up your writing day for the sake of your day with your daughter. That’s how it feels to understand, in your bloodstream, in your bones, that you’re a person with a pocket full of seeds, whether you pretend those seeds don’t exist or not.
Don’t pretend you’re a dream killer. Don’t pretend that there is such a thing as a failure or a wannabe. Don’t run away from what you’ve created, even if it carries some sadness with it. You are a dreamer, a gardener, a queen, an ocean, a galaxy, a universe. You’re the one demon lover dragon sprite with the sheer force and joy and brilliance to do the exact work that you were built to do. All your heart and body ask is that you acknowledge the truth of that. All your bones want is for you to stick your hands in the warm water and feel the possibilities of this day. All your spirit wants is for you to hear the spirits of the dead, whispering to you through the night, telling you that you still have it. Enjoy what you have. You will have it until you’re dead in the ground.
Honor what you have. Respect and cherish what you are. Run your fingers through the seeds in your pocket. It is enough.
Polly
Thank you for letting me do this work every day. I’m so grateful for you. Sending love to each and every one of you.
As someone who has similar interests, I just want to say that the past 15 years have been particularly rough on people who like comic books and music. We grew up in a world where niche content was rare and precious and boredom was a constant problem. Now we live in a world where infinite niche content is a click away and overstimulation is a constant problem. But while this whole transition was going on, the people who made indie comics and indie music were being constantly told to give it away for free--actually you should be grateful you're getting attention at all. And now our precious word "indie" doesn't mean anything at all. It has been a very fucked up century so far. So yeah, I'm not surprised you feel discouraged and burnt out, I do too. Figuring out how to put that same "indie" creative drive towards other ways of making and sharing is a constant effort for me. But somehow I'm still so grateful that I developed my sense of self before social media.
One thing that always helps me, and this is something that Polly touched on, is that even if you are jealous of other people have accomplished, there are still people who are jealous of what YOU have accomplished. I think that holds true for anyone who has ever accomplished anything, great or small. The goal posts are always moving. So it's ok to acknowledge that the small thing you did accomplish matters, and to recognize that other people might think they would be happier if they had accomplished that small thing too. And it's ok to remind yourself that people who have accomplished "more" also feel chronically unsatisfied. Being unsatisfied is a prequisite for creativity, I think, because creativity is all about desire for what doesn't yet exist.