Hi friends,
Happy weekend! At least, I think it’s the weekend. My days have turned into such a mixture of who knows what that I have to witness others actively doing “weekend activities” for me to realize it’s Saturday. As a freelancer, it was already so easy for my days to blur. But as we’re entering the fifth month of this nonsense, a slow simmer of pandemic fatigue has me in a continually dazed state.
Today I’d like to write to you about something tangentially related to our current collective reality. Because I need a bit of a break from it and I assume you do too. Today is about giving yourself permission to dream and setting the guardrails up for success.
I’m a year and a half into my freelance career and I am just now giving myself permission to dream. ‘Weren’t you already dreaming when you thought you could make a career out of freelance writing?’ you might ask.
Well, yes! I was dreaming. In the very cloud-like, wishful thinking, escape my current reality, hopes for the future type of dreaming.
But now, months and months in I am dreaming with structure. I am dreaming with purpose because it is now necessary for me to put up definitive barriers around my sanity to get anything done. It is so hard to shut off the news, to quit the doom scrolling, to not leave my heart exposed to every new catastrophe that arises. And with all of that, my creativity has suffered.
I used to believe that creativity was about free-flowing magic. About “being authentically me” and exposing myself to everyone and everything, to be in a constant state of absorption for the sake of inspiration. To notice every little detail of the world around me so that I could make something meaningful out of it.
And I was like this for a long time. Life in New York makes it easy to attend as many of the after-work talks and breakfast roundtables you desire. I would continuously creep on all of my career crushes on social media and sometimes meet them in person too, say yes to everything that hit my inbox, and actively apply to an array of projects, even if they didn’t connect to the core of what I want my work to evolve into. I said yes to it all. And that might have ended up working itself out in the Before Times.
But the Before Times are no longer.
Now there is a certain sensitivity and care that must go into the everyday. The ways in which we set up our home (and inadvertently our work, if we are privileged enough to have work and be able to do it from home). The precautions we take to protect both our physical and mental health. The fears of what school reopenings may bring, impending winter, an election, a death toll from March that’s climbing up, leading into the abyss.
That unrestrained dreaming of my Before Times is gone. I’ve mourned it for weeks. It’s been hard to write this letter to you and do other things that bring me joy, like keeping up with my blog and being present with my family and friends. When planning for the future is about safety rather than opportunity, about ordering masks instead of saving for a vacation, how do we continue to dream?
I have to keep dreaming. But now my dreaming requires a necessary form and structure for it to take shape. I used to say things like, “I’m going to write a book” and “I’m going to get X amount of clients.” My future was limitless. When starting from nothing, all I could feel was an ambition for what would eventually, naturally, come to me. I realize now that I let my dreams float along without timeframes and monetary minimums and clear divisions between what I would and would not accept because putting brackets around a dream makes it real.
To define the dream gives it shape. A very specific shape, that you can whittle into something so detailed, so precise, you are left with no choice but to commit to the dream.
And perhaps that’s the silver lining of all of this.
What if out of this absolute chaos our dreams become refined? What if what we take away from this horrific moment in history is that we don’t have time? At least, not own it in the way we assumed we did. What if we now understand that we were fooling ourselves to ever think we could haphazardly plan out our lives or predict what tomorrow holds? To put up with things we said we’d let go of tomorrow? Absolutely nothing is concrete and there is no guarantee the seeds we plant will grow into the full fruition of our dreams. But isn’t that the lesson here? The preciousness of now is too sacred to waste on anything but what you most deeply desire.
It’s scary to put the pen to paper. To begin working on the dream, knowing you’re not very good at it but hope to improve. It’s scary to put self-prescribed deadlines in your calendar. To cold email strangers. To spend hours on what will be sent into the void. To speak the dream into existence.
But you know what’s even scarier? Living month to month in a fog state of hoping today’s the day the inspiration hits so you can finally begin the work on that far off dream. Leaving yourself open to anything because you didn’t become clear on the one something.
I hope you dream big right now. Your dreams are worth your time. Your dreams are worth batting away the sadness and anger that rears its head so often these days. Your dreams are worth your full attention. Because our world feels so small and suffocating, I think it is imperative that you let yourself dream. Big.
With love,
Emily
What I’m Reading:
You can follow along in my Instagram Stories as I attempt to complete my ‘52 Books Read in 2020’ challenge. It’s not going too well…but the year ain’t over!
I’m currently reading The Yellow House by Sarah Broom and can’t put it down.
Michelle Obama says she has ‘low-grade depression.’ Women of color say her openness is freeing, The Lily
A Season of Grief and Release: 5 Months of the Virus in New York City, NYTimes
Stress on Your Systems, Womanly Magazine
Lady Maker Love:
I originally started my blog to highlight creative female entrepreneurs and I feel like I’ve lost sight of that goal. I’ll now be highlighting a female creator/maker/artist/writer in my newsletter.
First up, Abigail Koffler of This Needs Hot Sauce. Her newsletter is about cooking, dining out, and making the most of all food-related stuff in New York and beyond. She doesn’t advertise this fact, but she’s a vegetarian. And so am I! So I find all of her recipes approachable. Her words also keep me informed of hot restaurant gossip I would never usually have any insight into. What else is there to look forward to these days…but food?
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