“You used to enter a room and it would light up. The spark is faded in your eyes. Michelle… is everything okay?”
I had been waiting months for someone to ask. I hadn’t told her, or anyone really, about what was happening in homeroom. I hadn’t shared what shaming, hurtful digs were thrown at me every day in the cafeteria, while the friends I thought would support me through anything stood by and laughed. My family wouldn’t believe me, and my friends were the ones driving me to eat my lunch in the bathroom stalls.
My seventh grade home economics teacher had pulled me aside after class. When I heard her ask me if I was okay, when I heard the voice of someone who had noticed that I wasn’t, that maybe I needed a friend, I couldn’t find the words to answer her. Tears streaming down my face, she led me to a table in the back of her room and put a handful of colored markers down on the table in front of me.
“It’s okay”, she said. “You don’t have to tell me right now. Just draw.”
And so, I did. I threw the tip of a red marker on to a blank page of printer paper and followed it with swirls of blue and green and purple, creating for myself and for my newfound confidant a narrative of my middle-school experience. I somehow felt able to express through art my transformation from a brace-faced yet popular tomboy to a suddenly curvy, clean-toothed 13-year-old void of female friends. She was patient, invested, attentive. She wrote me a pass to eat in her classroom during lunch. She gave me space to tell my story the way I needed to.
And then she told me she was the assistant director of that year’s middle school production of Oz, and asked me to audition.
As Dorothy, I was given the gift of a few hours after school every day to live a life far away from my own. I had a purpose, an outlet, and, I soon discovered, a desirable talent. People would clap for me when I sang, they would tell me how much potential I had. My old friends showed up to opening night and stayed after to take pictures with me. Suddenly, after a year of silence, confusion, and self-hatred, I had worth.
And I chased it tirelessly for the next 10 years.
I spent all of high school and college unflaggingly pursuing my dream of being on Broadway. I spent every waking hour practicing singing, dancing, or acting, but it wasn’t until 6 months ago that I ever questioned why.
Amidst the strange fog that is the first few months out of college, I began searching for clarity. I started to practice meditation and yoga and mindfulness and self-awareness and for the first time in my life began to feel the warmth of being okay with who I was and where I was at.
Suddenly, my desire to perform began to melt away. I started to understand that the industry I was begging for approval from was never going to satisfy what I actually wanted from myself. I started to notice the artists around me who truly and confidently loved their craft and didn’t need an audience to validate their goodness. And I finally started to see that at the core of the dream I had been chasing for half of my life was a desperate search for the self-worth and acceptance I hadn’t gotten when I was thirteen.
As children we constantly hear the phrase "follow your dreams". But inherently, the word follow implies blindly doing something without questioning it.
Dreams and goals are important and I am not arguing otherwise. In fact, I think they are some of the most invaluable things we can have. But time is precious. We are precious. And we should be conscious of what we spend our lives pursuing.
I was a little kid that wanted desperately to feel loved and valued. I didn’t actually need to be on Broadway to do that. Once I understood that, it allowed me the space to form new dreams. I started a career in technology at a company that I believe is changing the world for the better. I began understanding my skills as transferable rather than limiting. I feel proud of the strength I can now get from myself and how that in turn has allowed me to spend my time helping those around me rather than yearning for others to validate me. Maybe one day I’ll even return to acting with a new mindset and a conscious purpose, seeking to give rather than to receive.
So I challenge you to question your dreams. Try to understand them, maybe even change them. Perhaps through awareness you’ll realize you undoubtedly want them, and that’s important too.
But in doing so, you won’t follow your dreams.
You’ll lead them.
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