Dreams Are Painful

 Been watching Encore on Disney+ again. There's always at least one kid in every high school musical who wants to go to Broadway. Sometimes they go and fail, sometimes they don't go at all, sometimes they think they're still going to go with truly no plan or plot to do so. Dreams are dreams I guess.

There is pain in those teen dreams. Big, unnamable pain. To watch the touring production of a show from a balcony and think "I could do that and I want to do that but I have no idea how to do that and part of me knows I never will and that world will always be, exactly as I see it now, another world." There were other people who watched from the same adolescent cheap seats and thought, "I can't wait to do that!" With abandon. And maybe they did or maybe they became barbers. (According to Encore, at least.) Or maybe they got really close and are inching closer, but there are still always going to be people, usually unintentionally ignorant, who don't understand how incredible being so close is.

I knew that pain and absorbed it and decided to be small because that's what seemed realistic. I met with an advisor for ______ and said I was interested in the theatre conservatory, which was supposedly TOP NOTCH. The advisor, without knowing anything about me besides the fact that I went to public school in St. Louis and had no summer stock credits or New York workshops under my belt, told me I wouldn't get in. And I believed that stranger. Why wouldn't I? She had an official polo on.

The good news is I don't like acting that much. I did then, but I think this turn in tide was inevitable, so I am grateful I wasn't in the deep end, potentially in mountains of debt, trying to make that adjustment. Instead I stayed in the kiddie pool, wading for what would be suitable for an average person like me and gradually walked forward until one day my toes didn't touch.

And now I am full-out swimming, which can be exciting, but brings a whole new level of pain. Pain that couldn't have been considered at 17. Pain of almost getting a dream job and not and then seeing billboards for that dream job everywhere. And then asking yourself if you're going to masochistically watch the dream job or ignore it at let the dream die. There's a whole THIRD level of pain to GET said dream job and fight inside of it about what should happen there and maybe you don't win and you have to be part of a thing you end up not even loving the way you thought you would. Or worse yet, you get the dream job, you fight for your voice in it, you win, you share the dream job with the world, and they DESPISE IT. I mean! Dreams are painful!