dear jojo,
how do you choose between two different dreams? i got my dream job teaching high school english at my dream school, but my other dream was to live in manhattan and work in the city. i already have one, but i will always still want the other. every time i go into the city i just think, well, fuck. how do i stop wondering about my parallel life?
signed,
confused
dear confused,
well - my first piece of advice to you is to be careful about using the word always. life is so long and so big and so full of unexpected changes (if we’re lucky) that whenever the words always or never get thrown around, sometimes from my own lips, i have to remind myself that nothing is an always or a never. stemming off the idea of always, though, when we want something really bad it’s easy to feel like we will always want it forever, or that we’ll never get it. but really - all philosophical tangents about the meaning of always aside - i need you to remember you are young. you are so, so fucking young still, and you have so much life left to live. you have no idea who you’ll meet tomorrow, or what new dreams will pop up, or whether your whole life will change next tuesday. you’re so young, in fact, that you don’t have to choose. in fact, i think it’s great you want more than one thing, more than one life. it shows you’re well-rounded and that you haven’t tried to cut your arms off to fit into the little tiny box our society likes to allot us all. fuck the box, dude. collect dreams like i collect coffee mugs and rescued black cats.
i think one of the biggest issues i take with the culture we both grew up in is that everything is presented as an all-or-nothing scenario. we’re taught that we get to have one big dream, one big love, one big career, and those only if we’re one of the lucky ones. but really, all of that is a big fat lie designed to keep us scared, and complacent, and doing things we don’t necessarily love or want to do. it’s simply untrue that we only get to have one thing we do, or define ourselves by, or that out of all our dreams we’re only allowed to live one.
one of the best, most rewarding parts of life is not knowing what will happen next. maybe you’ll stay where you are and find a deep, running current of gratitude for the life you are living, one that deepens with each passing year. it’s true that the longer we stick with something, whether a living dream or a partner or a hobby, the greater the depths we find in these situations and practices. you might stay with what’s happening already and find that the reward of staying in one place, deepening your connections where you are, growing your life from the roots up, is exactly where you want to be and how you want to live.
and you also may not. you have decades and decades and decades of life left to live, and that’s enough for at least two or three different lives. you have the gift of already having something you wanted, and so you already know how sweet life can be, how delicious it can be to sink our teeth into the present moment. and knowing how satisfying, how deeply gratifying life can be sets us up to follow our hearts better. if i feel ungrateful and dissatisfied by everything, then when good things pop up or i find myself getting what i want i won’t appreciate it or pay attention to it. attention is the greatest gift we can give ourselves. noticing when we get what we want, noticing what’s happening around us, noticing what thoughts and feelings and desires crop up for us in our day-to-day living are all the keys that unlock the door to fulfillment. maybe, as you grow your practices of gratitude and of noticing, you will find it’s time to follow that call to move to new york in a year or two or ten or twenty. maybe you’ll decide you want to buy a crumbling farmhouse and restore it from scratch, or you’ll move to japan, or you’ll become deeply invested in baking and spend all your sundays hosting brunches and trying new muffin recipes. i don’t know what will happen, but i know you are capable of paying attention to what you want, because you have already given yourself the gift of living one of your dreams. and as long as you keep paying attention to what’s going on, internally and externally, you will be able to follow your curiosity, your dreams, your passions. you’ll know when it’s time to try another dream, or, alternatively, time to retire an old dream. but in the meantime you really don’t have to worry about it. i know, we could all die tomorrow or get hit by a bus this weekend, so we should seize the day, take advantage of every opportunity, blah blah blah. but it’s also true that we have to be present with what we have. maybe what you have is exactly what you want. or maybe what you have will stop being enough, and that call of your parallel life will get stronger and stronger until eventually you decide it’s time to follow it.
so, no, i won’t or can’t give you advice on how to abandon one of your dreams for the other. first of all, having dreams and desires is important psychologically - we need to want things, we need to have things to daydream about, we need to have a sense of the future and what it might bring us. all of these things help to keep up emotionally and mentally sane. whether or not you follow this particular dream or not is up to you, babe. but seriously. just pause for now. notice how fucking young you are, and how big and bright and scary it is to be growing up in a world where anything can happen. notice what it’s like to make yourself coffee every morning. notice how the sunlight comes in through the window when you’re up early and standing barefoot in the kitchen. notice how your students respond to what you say, what you read, how you carry yourself. notice the way your friends swarm around you with love on birthdays and weekends and all the other times you get together with them. notice how good it feels to take the train into the city, the red of the seats on metro north, the rocking lullaby of the carriage swinging over a bridge. you have so much happening, so much to be grateful for. and you have to make your choices from that space, the space where everything is happening and you can see and feel it as it’s building and shifting and dancing with you.
cultivating a strong sense of paying attention will tell you when it’s time to move on, when it’s time to pack up, or when it’s time to settle in, to grow your roots even deeper, to stay in on a saturday night curled up in bed or on your favorite couch with a book to read. the deeper and the more in touch we are with what’s happening right in front of us the deeper we can connect to the other parts of ourselves, the parts that ask us to move to new cities or start new careers or find new lovers. just keep paying attention. keep cultivating gratitude. keep remembering your five-year-old self, your sixteen-year-old self, your twenty-year-old sense, and how proud they would be of you now, how cool they would think you were if they met you. and when and if the time comes to live that other dream, you’ll be ready, because you’ll have appreciated this time for exactly what it was, and you’ll be able to move on without any feelings that you didn’t take it in enough, that you missed what was happening around you. you are so young. you don’t have to know what you’re going to do next, and you certainly don’t have to retire any of the other dreams you have for yourself. you do not need to make yourself, or your appetite for living, smaller. (and i would suggest retiring any friendships that make you feel like you do.) you just have to pay attention to what you’re doing now.
xoxo,
jojo
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