The Dream I Buried in a Journal

On the longing we write down and never say out loud, and what it costs us to keep it that way.

For twenty years, on and off, I have kept a journal. And buried in its pages, again and again, in different handwriting and different decades and different versions of my life, is the same longing, written almost apologetically, like I needed permission just to put it on paper. 

I want to live near mountains.
I want hiking to be something I do every week and not a vacation.
I want to ski before lunch and work in the afternoon.
I want a career that bends around this kind of life instead of a life that bends around a career.

Then I'd close the journal, tell myself the timing wasn't right, that it was in no way possible, and go back to the life I already had.

That's what most of us do with our dreams. We write them in margins, keep them in closets and think about them in the last five minutes before sleep. We tell ourselves we are being responsible, but it isn't. It's burial.

I don't mean the dreams we have while we sleep, the strange ones that fade by breakfast. I mean the ones we let ourselves imagine while we're wide awake, the kind that ask something bigger of us than just getting through the day; the kind rooted in our values and our passions and the life we actually want instead of the one we quietly settle for. That kind of dreaming isn't indulgent. It's the compass. It's the difference between existing and choosing.

Something interesting turned up when I went looking in the research. A University of Houston psychologist named Rodica Damian tracked people for over a decade and found that those who set ambitious life goals when they were young tended to end up with more education, more income, and more meaningful work twelve years later, even when the specific dream changed shape along the way. The goal itself wasn't the magic, the habit of dreaming boldly was.

Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, built a whole framework around this same idea, that a life well lived needs meaning and purpose the way it needs connection and joy, not someday but now.

Burying our dreams has a cost. We just don't put it on the list of costs, because it's invisible. Nobody hands you a bill for the version of yourself you didn't become, but it shows up anyway, in the restlessness, in the ache that sleep doesn't fix, in the quiet resentment that surfaces at the strangest times. The real loss isn't the dream that didn't work out. It's the one you never let yourself say out loud.

I got there, eventually, not all at once and not without plenty of stalling. And still, landing one dream from the journal into my actual life didn't cure me of burying the next one. There's always a new page, a new want, a sentence I've written and haven't said out loud yet. Arriving doesn't end the practice. It just proves the practice works, which somehow makes it both easier and scarier to keep doing.

We don't dream big enough, most of us. Not because we lack imagination, but because we've spent years training ourselves out of using it.

What would it look like to actually tap into that imagination? To bring our courage, our audacity, our boldest, most possibility focused thinking into our real, ordinary lives, instead of saving it for vision boards we make once a year and never look at again.

What would it mean to give ourselves full permission, not the conditional kind, to hold a real vision for what we want this one magical, complicated, beautiful life to look and feel like?

What would be possible if we suspended constraint? Societal expectations? Self imposed limitations we've mistaken for realism for so long we forgot we invented it?

What if?

Let's start a collective dream practice, you and I. Let's say the things out loud, even when our voice shakes. Let's stop apologizing for wanting what we want. Let's support each other in taking the small, unglamorous actions that move us in the direction of the life we're actually dreaming about, not the one we settled for because it was easier to explain at dinner parties.

So let's start something together. Not a five year plan. A practice.

• Say it out loud. Tell one person you trust, even if your voice shakes when you do it. Something happens the moment a dream leaves your head and enters the air between two people. It becomes harder to bury again.

• Write it down where you'll actually see it. Not once in a journal you'll forget by winter, but somewhere it can catch your eye on an ordinary Tuesday and remind you it's still waiting.

• Take one small, almost embarrassingly small action this week. You don't need the whole staircase. You need the first step and the willingness to take it scared.

I write this from Colorado now, mountains out the window, a life I once only let myself want on paper. It didn't arrive because I finally found the perfect plan. It arrived because I got tired of apologizing for wanting it and started saying it out loud instead. 

I'm living proof that dreams come true when we stop treating them like secrets. What's the one you've been keeping?

Stop tucking your dreams
into the pages of your journal
and start living the life you
only ever thought you
could read about
Holly Kerr

With you in it, Laura