Wishes are not something you choose, I don’t think – which is odd because we have the idea of a genie granting 3 wishes you pick. Maybe it’s a misnomer, he would actually be granting desires. A wish, as I’ve ever experienced it, comes to you and puts your heart in a chokehold. When I think about the insane shit people do to achieve their dreams, there’s no shot they would push through if it was a logical choice among multiple viable options. People can white knuckle a lot when they think they have to, but a career path you picked from a personality quiz your high school guidance counsellor gave you isn’t exactly motivational rocket fuel. A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you’re fast asleep – and it’s not giving you a full menu, this is chef’s choice.
Counterpoint – when I was in 3rd grade, I was going to be a mouse. I didn’t want to be a mouse, I knew I would be – soon there would be the technology, and just like in Roald Dahl’s book “The Witches”, I would get to live the fantastic adventure of being 3 inches tall and looking like an adorable fuzzball.
That…has yet to come to pass. And I don’t think I would want it to at this point. With that example it’s easy to say kids wish for the dumbest stuff – but the slippery slope with that is, the best dreams are the ones that feel exactly that stupid and impossible. What adult discernment can we bring to allow for childlike wonder and fantasy, while being grounded enough to at least exist in our shared physical dimension?
Mama Oatie’s song “Dig a Little Deeper” from the Princess and the Frog is something I’ve come back to a lot since I watched the movie a few months ago. She says in essence, when you feel like you are banging your head against a wall with your dream, dig into the core of that dream, beyond the specifics. For the mouse example, what did I want? Adventure, freedom, escape. There’s probably also a level of wanting to be small and invisible, and able hide where no one can get to me, but we don’t need to unpack all that because this is a positive and cheesy blog post for once!!!
That advice has helped me reframe a lot of my disappointments, and manage expectations, but Counter Counter-Point: sometimes the dumb dreams do in specific come true. An experience I had like that was seeing Danny in Anaheim at Kurtis’ stand up show a year ago. There was some logic to the hunch he would be there – even though the boys were not making any public appearances at vidcon I thought they might still have the summer meetup for traditions sake. In hindsight, though, that’s a pretty flimsy reason. The real thing giving me unrealistic certainty was this very vivid vision I had of making eye contact with him – I don’t know if it was something I even told anyone about beforehand because rationally I could not see it as anything other than wishful thinking. But though I went back and forth in my mind about feeling childish and stupid, but hopeful, but cringe and delusional and blah blah blah, my heart was guiding one foot in front of the other without any hesitation. Much to my logical mind’s chagrin, the vision did come to pass – the only bit of poignant irony, to be so ungrateful, was that it happened while he was wearing opaque sunglasses. Sometimes, woowoo me says, you just know. Or, I counter, you get lucky. But some things or some people are worth taking a chance on.
And so I think to myself, what is the bigger dream – with my art or my life – that my brain is trying to protect me from? What has it shoved in a closet because it knows if I saw it, I would be unable to resist a very risky, difficult life path that would almost certainly end in failure? I’ve tried so many things that seemed right but just felt off, and I almost see a silhouette emerging from all the attempts, a frame around a vision but the picture is still obscured. It’s love, and fulfilment, connection, joy… being seen through my art, and other people feeling seen from it… but it’s formless, it’s just a feeling.
I think I’m at a point where I need to put my ego and intellect in the back seat for a bit, and let my intuition follow the video game sparkles. They can still yell at her if we are driving off a cliff, but they’ve had a decade or more to get us out of this forest and it’s someone else’s turn, even if it sounds very stupid. Where is the 5 year plan? There isn’t one, I’m making a booth for a craft faire. I’ll probably make＄17 dollars and get comments that my art looks like AI. I’m starting a comic and who the fuck pays for comics anymore. It’s all very, very dumb – but when smart doesn’t work, it’s actually more dumb to do the same thing over and over and expect a different result. Bizarrely, the rational approach right now might be to believe dreams can come true.
>>robyns_ramblings 