Follow your dreams…but what dreams?

Sylvie had, has, the voice of an angel.  The sort of voice that you hear in your dreams.  I met her at University and even in her late teens, when she sang it would lift your soul, or bring you to laughter, or tears.  Sometimes it would do all three in the course of five glorious minutes.

Despite her abundance of talent she didn’t allow it to go to her head.  She wore it lightly and was excellent company over a beer or a coffee.  You always knew when she was around. That trained voice would ring out in peals of laughter over even the most crowded of student bars.

After university it was of course inevitable that she went to one of the top London conservatoires to study to be an opera singer.  There was no decision to make, it was what everyone had told her she was always going to do.  Equally none of us were surprised when she took all of the top prizes while she was there.

I lost touch with her at that point, but I would see her long-term boyfriend, Seb, occasionally over the following years. We had similar friends so we would bump into each other at the same parties.  He was always there alone as she was performing in New York, or Sydney, or Paris or Milan or Hong Kong or somewhere else around the world.

They were a golden couple: Sylvie and Seb, Seb and Sylvie.  Whenever Seb spoke about her you could see him light up with love and pride. As a result I was delighted to hear that they had got engaged and even more so when I heard that Sylvie was pregnant and had taken six months out from her career around the birth their daughter, Heather.

Dreams of having it all

I lost touch with both of them for a while after that, but I picked up snippets about them every now and then. After she went back to work Sylvie’s career exploded.  Directors couldn’t get enough of her.  She was so talented that her agent had her fully booked three years in advance.

To make all this work Seb gave up his career as a city lawyer to become a full-time parent.  That meant Sylvie could focus on her career.  From a distance I thought that they were living out what I thought a 21^st century relationship should be.  A couple supporting each other to live their best lives. Each person stepping up or stepping back at different times.

Until Heather turned one, Seb and the baby would follow Sylvie around the world.  When she was doing a season at La Scala or the Met they would rent an apartment nearby.  Seb would be the full-time parent but when Sylvie wasn’t working she could bond with Heather.

Once Heather was a little older she needed some stability, so they bought a house in a beautiful village 30 minutes’ drive from Heathrow.  Seb became a stay-at-home dad but they both wanted to make it as easy as possible for Sylvie to get back to her family.

Aged 30 Sylvie had it all.  The house, the husband, the child AND the career.  All those years ago, if I had thought to ask 19-year-old Sylvie where she wanted to be a decade later she would have bust out that big laugh and, almost certainly, described the life that she was living right now.

What I would say though is that if I had asked her why she wanted that life she would have given me a puzzled look.  This was her destiny.  She had always been told that this is where her life was heading.  What else would she want?  The she would have laughed again and got another round in.

Let’s leave Sylvie laughing there for the moment.  I’ll come back to them later.

Dreaming my own dreams

I’ve been thinking about my dreams recently.  My dive back into long hours and late nights has catapulted me back to my youth and, inadvertently, reminded me of my dreams when I was younger.  In my early 20s I knew, KNEW, what I wanted.  What I DESERVED darn it.  I wanted the big house, the big car, the big job.  I wanted the international travel, the secretary, and the corner office. Of course to complement all of that I wanted a wife and high achieving kids.  Naturally we would all go skiing every Easter and spend a couple of weeks over the summer in Asia or the States or the Caribbean.  To be honest it would hardly be worth mentioning the regular Christmas markets in Vienna, the Jazz weekends in Prague, zipping over to Paris for a springtime walk down the Seine.

It was all so clear to me. Looking back, I was intensely, embarrassingly, materialistic and status driven.

And I was en route to getting those prizes as well.  Early promotions, international travel for work, the secretary, the house, the car, the expenses.  All of that was mine in my 20s.

Thinking about it now I cringe at that. I had everything that I wanted but it was all so hollow.  In that same time my friendships and health suffered.  I ate and drank far, far too much and I slept and exercised far, far too little.  In the middle of that period I got married.  When I look at our wedding pictures and I see dark sunken eyes almost lost in the depths of a bloated face.  What had I become?

 

Sweet dreams are made of this

Part of my journey over recent years has been to try to work out what my dreams actually are.  It’s harder than I thought.   I’ve had to strip away so many layers.  What society at large expects me to want, what my friends expect me to want, what my family expect me to want.  Each layer that’s removed reveals another.  Tougher to pierce harder than the last.

As I dig down though I realise that the toughest layer of all is the one that is my own expectations.  Stripping away what I “expect” myself to want.  This is facing down the teenage, and young adult and even the 30-something me.  Challenging those avatars of my past to explain why they thought they wanted what they wanted.

After I read about the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone I wished that I could gaze into it.  Not because I wanted to lose myself in it in the way that Harry did, but rather so that I would know what my heart truly desired.   Even now I don’t really know.

 

Be careful what you wish for

If I’m honest my youthful dreams were somewhat pedestrian, cliched even.  I wanted material success and the approval of my peers.  My big dreams were pretty small.  And even though I achieved them, the did not bring me happiness.

But maybe that was the problem.  Small dreams, small mind.  What would have happened if I had dreamt bigger?  What would have happened if I had wanted the world?

So back to Seb and Sylvie, Sylvie and Seb.  The golden couple embracing on top of their pedestal, the world at their feet.  Big dream for big people.

Sylvie

Without Seb and Heather around, things started to get tough for Sylvie when she was on the road.  Alone In a hotel room for weeks on end her mental health started to suffer.  Away from her friends and family Sylvie started to suffer from depression.  Tablets masked the pain in part but they could not remove it.  On her days off she would spend the whole day in bed often crying the whole time.  When she was back home she struggled to reconnect with Seb and Heather.  Not because she didn’t want to but because she was scared. Scared of somehow contaminating them and their lives with the black stain she felt inside her.  So instead of drawing then close, she pushed them away.

Seb

Back in England Seb was also hurting.  He loved being a father and didn’t resent being at home bringing up their daughter.  He couldn’t be more proud of everything that Sylvie was achieving and he felt privileged to be able to support her.  But he missed his wife, his best friend.  She was away so much and when she was back she was distant.  No matter what he did he couldn’t get through to her.

The family outings that he planned would end with silent uncomfortable drives home.  When he would organise a babysitter so that they could go out for dinner as a couple all of his conversational gambits would fall on deaf ears.  It was as if a sphere of silence would surround their table in the middle of a busy restaurant.  He even organised a surprise party for her after a particularly long stint away and after ten minutes Sylvie pleaded a headache and went to their bedroom until everyone had left.

Should he have recognised the signs of depression?  Maybe.  But this was more than a decade and a half ago. The more open conversations and knowledge that we have today just weren’t as prevalent.

So, over the course of a few years, the marriage fell apart.  There was no one else, just two people that loved each other so much and had become strangers.  Eventually they divorced.  Seb had custody of Heather and they went their separate ways.

 

What are my dreams now?  Or do Cavemen dream of prehistoric sheep?

What a bleak tale.  Should we dream small then?  Should we give up on our dreams altogether?  Do dreams lead to misery whether you achieve them or not?

If so, where does that leave me?  My journey to Financial Independence is to help me to achieve my dreams.  What am I pushing for if not to gain a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

The conclusion that I’ve come to is that I DO want to have dreams.  But I want to have MY dreams.  Healthy dreams.  Dreams that I am sure that I really want.  Dreams that are right for me and my family.

If I achieve my dreams then great.  I’ll go and find more.  Because having a dream is important.  It keeps us glancing up at the stars even as we trudge through the gutter.  In many ways it doesn’t even matter what that dream is.  So long as you have a dream, any dream, it’s OK if that changes.

Because, of course, dreams change over time.  It’s obvious when we think about it.  What I want in my 40s is, understandably, different to what I wanted in my 20s.  My materialistic dreams of my youth have transformed into dreams of self-improvement and family and community.  When people talk about giving up on their dreams they are usually talking about the dreams from their youth.

It’s OK to step back and re-examine your dreams.  Do those dreams require sacrifice?  If so are the those sacrifices worth it?  If not, then I won’t fear walking away and changing them.

So yes, you may not be able to play football for England anymore, but you can still play in a Sunday league and dream of winning your division.

You may never spend a decade living Hemmingway-like in a garret in Paris.  But you can still dream of learning French, and saving up to visit the city of love to stroll along the Champs-Elysee.

You may never sell out Wembley stadium or Madison Square Gardens but you can still learn the guitar and play a set at your kids’ Christmas fair.

But it’s also OK if your dreams don’t change.

There’s nothing stopping you picking up a pen and writing that novel.  There is nothing stopping you learning an instrument.  If you want to climb Kilimanjaro then start saving, pull on your walking boots and get training.  It may take months or even years to get there but if you really want it then the journey, as well as the destination, will give you pleasure.

But what of Seb and Sylvie

You didn’t think that I was going to leave Sylvie and Seb’s story there did you?  Let me bring you up to the present day.

Seb

The divorce devasted Seb, but he had Heather to look after.  To keep his mind active, when Heather had started at nursery he had started a PhD at the local university.  After the divorce he threw himself into it and completed it in a year.  That led to a job at the University which in turn led to him marrying a fellow academic a couple of years ago.  I occasionally see him popping up as a talking head on TV.   I don’t know if he expected his life to turn out the way that it did, but he is now happy, successful and fulfilled.  You might say that his dreams have come true.

Sylvie

But what of Sylvie.  Well, things got worse for her for a while after the divorce.   She carried on performing but the depression got worse until one day she came to the end of her run and told her agent that she was done.  Always honourable, she did her bookings for the next three months and then she stopped.

At that point she disappeared to a cottage in Scotland and, except for a few friends she cut herself off from the world.  I imagine that the following months were pretty bleak for her.  No career, no marriage, no sense of her future.  The only thing that kept her going were the regular visits with her daughter.  In the divorce Seb had made it clear that Sylvie could see Heather whenever she wanted, but Sylvie was so trapped in her mental illness that she only felt able to go to the fortnightly scheduled visits.   Those visits were difficult to say the least as Sylvie was still so scared of hurting Heather that she ending up keeping her at a distance.  Unsurprisingly her small child struggled to understand.

Eventually, with the support of her friends, and in particular Seb, Sylvie started counselling.  It’s been a long road but she is getting there.  She’s started a relationship and last year she started teaching piano at the local secondary school.  More importantly she has been rebuilding her relationship with Heather.  That’s a longer road but I think she will get there.

Coda

This has rambled somewhat but I think that my point is this.  We have to know what OUR dreams are.  Not what we’ve been told we want, not what we think we want, but what we actually want.  In the Financial Independence community the stories of those who achieve their financial dreams and then end up lost are legion.  We get so focused on the process and the journey we lose sight of why we are doing it.  What we want that is actually going to make US happy.

Now, when I get tempted to fall back into what society tells me should make me happy, I put on a CD and listen to the voice of an angel.  An angel that touched the sun and was burned.  And then, having fallen to earth, is rebuilding her dreams.