Wednesday, June 9, 2010
I Never Dreamed
I love the Glee version of I Dreamed a Dream. I sing in over and over. The wife hates it when I sing. Anyway, the part that says, "I had a dream my life would be, so much different from this hell I"m living" really resonates with me, and I can't help but belt it out as I am listening. So, the wife says, do you feel this way? Do you feel your life is hell? And in a way that only I can, I conjure up a twisted truth in my head and tell her no. That's silly. How do I twist to make that the truth? Well, I never dreamed. I always had my LDS blinders on. I do the mission, get married, have kids. The end. That is life. I never dreamed of any other life, so how could I say that my dreamed my life would be different? But that's just it. I never dreamed. I never thought, maybe I don't have to get married. I never thought, maybe we don't have to have kids 15 months after tying the eternal knot. Maybe even though I've always wanted kids, it won't be all it's cracked up to be. I never allowed myself time to make friends. I never dreamed that this life would be so lonely. I have a family that loves me, but no big deal, who cares, I want more. And yes, I can hear you on the other side, those of you who have not gotten married, because you took off those blinders. You want more too. We all want more. We want to have our cake and eat it too. And we want a piece of someone else's cake. And we don't want to be judged for it. We just want to be.
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5 comments:
The song from South Pacific (Happy Talky-Talk) that has the line, "if you don't have a dream, how you gonna make your dream come true" always seemed to resonate with me. Due to ssa feelings, I had pretty much given up on "the dream" when I was a teenager; I figured that I had no dreams.
I think it's common to feel as though there's "something more than this." I guess the trick is to find a way to reconcile what we want with what we have and are.
Thanks for the comment Finn. I almost didn't publish this post because I feel it makes me seem like such a whiner. I guess I'm always needing reassurance that I'm not really alone. Now for reconciliation.
I think there is a lot of loneliness without a tribe, a military unit, a large family or some other sizeable group to be surrounded in noise with. It's our modern lifestyle that creates part of the problem. The other issue is an assumption that we all have to be more alike than we are different. That is not true and when we can stop looking for our mirror images we then can experience the full impact of family and community.
There is tremendous loneliness in marriages which takes many forms and not just because one partner may be LGBT, I've seen a lot of it in straights too.
I learned to love and cherish that internal life called loneliness and to nurture that quietness and aloneness and drill deeply into a peaceful place in difficult times. If you can learn to embrace it you will find great gifts there as well as the more obvious sadness.
Well, its back to hippieland for me.
Oh and those crazy what if scenarios. You will never stop making that analysis called second guessing. Of course you could have waited to have children, but one of the saddest stories I have ever heard was from a 50 year old woman who married pursued a career, never achieved what she hoped to career wise, and when she did decide she wanted kids couldn't get pregnant, then got cancer and so on and so on. All kinds of people wonder if they made the right choice at the right time.
I'm convinced that I would have made similar if not exactly duplicative choices given the same knowledge. It's only after you get the knowledge that you can really analyze the choice, "hindsight is 20/20,"
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