In the waking world, I have two beautiful sisters who are
both blonde. But in the dream, my sister was a lovely brunette, a talented
architect . . . and the building on which she was working collapsed and killed her.
My dream-self was devastated, and wanted to honor her in some way.
Someone—maybe her ghost, maybe one of those wise voices that sometimes show up
in dreams—told me to finish the building for her, but I was afraid. It had
killed her. What if it destroyed me, too?
“You have to build what you fear.” That’s the line that
echoed in my mind when I awoke. I knew it was true. Or maybe it would be better
to say I knew it was a True Dream, one of those occasions when the deeper mind
speaks and the night visions are more than just a reflection of gut-level urges
and fears. Still, I didn’t know what to do with it. I’m afraid a lot of the
time, or at least anxious. I felt like I was building in fear all the damn time.
But that’s not what the voice in my dream meant, though it’s
taken a few years to understand. Trying to construct a career or a life out of
fear is not the same thing as building what you fear. Here’s the thing: I’m
afraid of being invisible. Forgotten. The only thing worse than a bad review is
no review at all. In some ways, it’s a great time to want a career in the arts.
Changes have made it possible to reach audiences in ways that were never
possible before. The flip side of that being a world so crowded with writers
and artists waving their creations, so full of a cacophony of voices—many of
them very good—that it’s almost impossible for any one person to make
themselves visible.
One blink, and you’ve disappeared.
At least, that’s the new narrative. You’ve got to put
yourself out there, create content, connect . . . constantly. Any lapse invites
vanishment. Silence is failure.
That pace has been crushing for me, though, especially
because there’s no payoff, no point of ‘enough.’ Interacting with people always
makes me feel like a foreigner trying to learn strange customs, and I never
seem to get it right. Now I’m exhausted. All I have left is the rubble of who I
thought I was.
You have to build what you fear.
So this is what I fear: Being invisible. Being forgotten. I’ve fought that all my life, tried to move
faster than obscurity, and only recently have I realized I can never outrun it.
So much of what we are, is fleeting and fragile, a brown leaf curling in the
wind, and gone. I can waste my life trying to escape that—trying, in essence,
to escape myself—or I can take a step to the side and really examine what’s
going on. I’m not sure what will happen if I stop grasping, but I want to
believe that at that moment, I will begin to build.
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