DREAMS

Meals shared with family or friends, nights spent drinking and talking, driving around in the city or a road trip. These are hours possibly filled with discussions about dreams and aspirations — what we are working and hoping for in life. 

Growing up, I remember playmates saying they wanted to be doctors, lawyers or pilots. As I was getting older, the ambitions became more specific: study in Wharton/Harvard/Johns Hopkins; have a business doing *insert some scheme that will make them roll in money*; get into social enterprise and help the poor; be famous; live and work abroad.

Magazines and self-help books are overrun with cliches telling us to “be you.” And I get it. Give too much weight to what others have going on for themselves and you run the risk of clouding what your “real self” desires. But, in all honestly, it’s not always easy to remain deaf and immune to all this big talk being thrown around. 

After witnessing discussions of end games and gameplans, I have occasionally found myself looking at my own dreams, asking, Why is it that I don’t seem to want the same things that they do? Are my own dreams too small and simple? Am I slacking off and choosing to be content with what is merely passable? 

Most of the time, I try not to beat myself up when I start talking to myself this way. I take it as something inevitable when you’ve just come from a session of “Life Thus Far and Future Goals Presentation” with people whose intellect, drive and constitution you respect. 

It can be extra unnerving when you seem to stick out like a sore thumb from the group. Worse when family, friends or SOs begin pinning hopes and ambitions on you. There's a doubting feeling that starts creeping up on you, one that affects even the best of us — whether young or not too young anymore. And it can easily escalate to a state of trying to determine if my current dreams are the "right ones."

It’s time like these, ones that are of extreme agitation, when it dawns on me why people say that you’re not supposed to compare yourself to others. 

Personal ambitions start in a certain form. Then, over time, they change. They do so because we change. What fulfils us and makes us happy changes over time, and we tweak our dreams to transform them into ones that are more attuned to who we really are.

So, the "rightness," perhaps, lies in how much of your dreams answer to the call of our identity, how much of it addresses our happiness and self-realisation (hello, philo professors). 

Several friends are devoting their lives to social enterprises and non-profit organisations. My grade school best friend shifted out of a pre-medicine track to be a theatre major and is now working on her dream. An entrepreneur friend fights very hard daily to build his business empire. Others are happily sticking to the corporate world, proving to naysayers that there is more to it than just being a “corporate slave.” Some are raising their families. All have varying goals, but all adamantly holding on because these are choices they decided for themselves. To them, I give my highest respect.

My mom has always told me that competition should only be with myself, not with others. My younger brain translated it to: don’t be mad at your classmates or friends if they end up doing better than you. I understand this a little differently now. It’s a contest revolving around how I allow myself to be truly who I am.

So maybe my dreams are not the same as my friends’. They may also be different from what my parents hope for me to chase. And they will, occasionally, disconcert me. But I have to stand my ground. Because just as how I respect my friends' chosen paths, I must respect my own desires, wants and ambitions. I must respect my dreams.