I am one of the luckiest people in the world. Sure life is crazy and things don’t always go my way. Sure, having a life worth living is a constant decision of YES, I’m going to make this thing happen, but I’m really lucky, especially where friends are concerned.
I’ve been fortunate to live all over the southeast and in Alaska, where I’ve accumulated a gaggle of some really great friends. I’m also fortunate to be a blogger, a lifestyle and career choice that has brought me so many of the brightest, most generous friends a gal could possibly hope for.
One of those friends is really the brain behind this site and her constant prodding has been the reason I’ve written so much over the course of the last month. She has also supported me in ways that each deserve their own post. She’s also my voice of reason and I swear, she’s going to be my springboard for eventual success. Every time I tell her about another one of my crazy ideas, I think she’s going to tell me to focus on one thing, but she’s not like that. Instead, she tells me to DO IT.
And yet I don’t do. Anything. I just have this brain full of 90s song lyrics and dead ideas.
You see, I’m a dreamer. I see big pictures and I have grand dreams and big ideas. The thing is, I’m not a doer. At all. My ideas and dreams keep me awake at night, distract me while I’m driving, and cause me so much excitement and anxiety that sometimes I want to crawl out of my own skin and go live in someone else’s body – just not another dreamer. I want that person to be a doer so I can experience what it feels like to just DO these things I’ve dreamt of.
These ideas are so exciting to me and I spend enormous amounts of brain power thinking about how grandiose they would be, how well-received they would be; how much success, renown, and prestige they could bring me. Yet that success stays in my head and the money doesn’t flow, and I can’t figure out WHY I’m so unfulfilled with what I’m doing.
I dreamt up this 365 feel-good project three years ago and I think about it all the time. I think it would be an amazing experience and could turn into a phenomenal toilet-read, but I haven’t acted on it beyond telling people about my FANTASTIC idea.
That dream now lives in the graveyard of good ideas that resides in my brain like an anchor. It weighs me down professionally, creatively, and exists solely to remind me what a failure I am. It is the ammunition I use against myself on a constant basis to remind me what a lousy person I am. It keeps me from mopping the floors and writing these posts and working harder on my dreams because I have so damn many of them.
Here lies the 365 Project. It could have touched thousands of people and contributed greatly to the “love yourself” campaign so rampant in today’s society, and yet here I sit doing my part by throwing flowers on the grave rather than resurrecting the idea and making it happen.
I have the ability to breathe life into my own dreams, nobody else can do that. And yet I find myself more comfortable looking at these dreams, stroking them softly, then lying them to rest until the next moment I find myself with nothing to do.
I want to be a gravedigger. I need to be a gravedigger to the thoughts and dreams I have for my life, but picking up the shovel has proven to be the most difficult part. Where will I put the dirt I have to dig up? What will I do with these decaying dreams as I dig them up? How can I shuffle things in my mind around to give each dream the attention it deserves?
I don’t know the answer to that. All I know is that I have to start digging, because if I don’t, I’m going to continue watching other people dig up my dreams and breathe life into them for themselves. I can’t stand on the outskirts of my mind anymore and say “I hope someone does that some day” and then feebly tell people that I had that idea once, a long time ago.
I want to sit on a chair on The Today Show and talk about how I made my dreams come true and talk about the expense of making them come true and inspire others to do the same. But how can I do that if I can’t even inspire myself?
When will the time come that I’m so exhausted and the graveyard has taken up so much space in my mind that I throw up my hands, pick up that shovel, and just start digging? How much longer do I have to keep fighting with myself to realize that I win if I act and lose when I keep burying these ideas? Is that time now? I know I’m destined for greater than what I have given myself.
The last year has been one of intense growth and massive amounts of forced introspection. Maybe the time is now. Maybe I’m reaching alpine level and I’m ready to summit this massive peak and just resurrect all of my dead ideas. Who’s to say I can’t? Only me. Because nobody can control the ghosts of my thoughts but me, and I’m tired of them haunting me, making me feel like I’ve failed.
What’s going to be behind my name in a year? Author. I’m calling it right now, and digging up all the ideas that I’ve previously laid to rest. I might be busy and frazzled and emotional and distant, but I feel it, the time is now. It has to be.
Because if it isn’t today, it won’t be tomorrow.
What great ideas do you have that you haven’t acted on? Will you hold my hand and come with me on this journey? Let’s dig up our dreams together and begin breathing life into them. There’s more out there just waiting for us to DO, so let’s do it.
[…] I have a tendency to start strong and then stop, but I can’t tell you why. I am my own worst enemy with war constantly waging in my head, fighting hard with my heart and the energy inside me that knows I am capable of being more than what I am. I doubt my abilities, I doubt my schedule, I doubt my support system. I heap expectations upon my own head and am incapable of climbing out of the wreckage when I collapse. I feel lazy and useless and I cock block myself right out of success and into failure. […]