The Ethereal Slipperiness of It All
Ten Years in New York, officially
Hold on tight, in fact.
I am continuing on with the subscription donation project. The organization for August is the Entertainment Community Fund, a fund that supports workers in the entertainment industry, including those who are affected by the current strikes.
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My dreams have been really vivid lately.
Remembering my dreams is pretty normal and consistent for me. Thanks to a multi-reason overactive bladder (you’re welcome for that information), I tend to wake up at least one time before I get out of bed. Usually the last time is somewhere between 5a and 7a. It is in that last bastion of sleep where I most strongly remember my dreams.
I figure it’s the liminal space of that time. I’m asleep, sure, but not totally asleep. Some mornings it’s the sort of asleep where my brain is awake enough to play puppet master to the scenarios. Other days, I’m just along for the ride. My track record for holding on to at least a few elements or moments from my dreams and then shouting them at friends later in the morning is pretty good.
Lately, it’s less me being a puppet master and more like me living in two timelines.
Most notably, in the last week or two, I had a dream that felt so real it took me hours after I got out of bed and into my day before I realized that those events had not, in fact, occurred. I did not, in protest of a group of people having a loud conversation just below my window, open the blinds fully and glare down at them like some sort of Miss Minchin until they quieted down and went on their way. I also did not miss shaving a whole strip of my leg like I briefly thought, even though I was certain I had run my hands over my shin and marveled at how I could miss such a big section. I may have missed a little bit but a) in real life, I don’t care that much. Shaving my legs is mostly a thing I do when I like to feel extra nice in my sheets. and 2) I know that sometimes, no matter how real something might feel, the corporality of it may not be the biggest thing to glean from the moment.
I won’t say it didn’t happen at all or won’t happen in the future because these are things that could happen. And truly, who’s to know if they have, will, or won’t?
The mundanity of this dream is what I latched onto as I tried to make sense of what had actually happened in my morning. Honestly, as someone who is known to have violent (emotionally and physically), surreal, and generally upsetting dreams relatively regularly, it’s the mundane ones that make me feel the weirdest and most unsettled. It makes me feel like I missed something, like I lost something, like someone was expecting something of me and I simply forgot, I simply did not do it.
That expectant person could certainly be me.
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Of course, the big NYC decade-aversary announcement post happened at the beginning of the month BUT, this week, it was official. Tuesday, August 22nd was my official decade in New York.
My friend Charlotte recently sent me a meme that made me login to Tumblr for the first time in…ten years. It was both a funny meme and fortuitous timing. Ten years ago, I had been pretty active on Tumblr. I had two of them: one regular reposting one and one called “bucketfuloflists.” I used that tumblr as a blog, a precursor to what would become this newsletter, really. It was a blog meant to catalog the activities I wanted to do before I left Seattle to move to New York. And after I moved to New York, it was meant to catalog the activities I wanted to do while living in the city. Tumblr has changed their layout a bit (of course, it’s been ten. years.) so I can’t actually find what was on those lists which is absolutely fine. As we know, I have a whole new list.
What I was not anticipating, however, was what did greet me when I logged in. It was this post:
It’s funny to me that the large majority of this short post is a copy-and-paste of what I wrote on Facebook with a little bit of extra commentary. Already a master of repurposing content for different platforms, I guess!
This week was a pretty normal week for a 36-year-old sometimes freelancing, mostly unemployed person who lives in New York during the humid summer months—not a lot happened. On Tuesday, I did a little neighborhood walkabout, hitting up Astoria Bookshop, the Lockwood Shops, and then grabbing red velvet cheesecake on the way home. It felt right to be out and about in Astoria that day because, for me, it feels right to be here most of the time. My plan for Wednesday was to do what 26-year-old Samantha had done all those years ago: go to the Natural History Museum. Unfortunately, contrary to what John Mayer might think, my body is not a wonderland. It is a nightmare. In terms of my body, the last couple of weeks have been kind of a lot of little question marks, questions I am trying to figure out sans health insurance. So, I didn’t put too much pressure on myself to do a ton of activities. I can go to the Natural History Museum another day. It’s still within the year of the NYC decade-aversary.
So, I celebrated my time here by being here. In my neighborhood. In my apartment.
Anniversary of place is something that has been important to me since, at least, when I left for college at 18. I, my family I should say, had moved before. Depending on if you never moved in childhood, we moved a decent amount of times. From Great Falls, Montana to Spokane, Washington to Cheney Washington. If you moved a lot growing up, you’re probably thinking, “That’s cute.”
Going to college was the first time I moved anywhere on my own. Moving in or around the age of 18 is common for a lot of people, college or no. That’s why there is so much media, music, literature about this time. That’s why relationships are often forged by trying to figure it all out over late night eats at the campus cafeteria. Moving—physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually—is something that all of us will do. When we do, we have to decide what to leave behind and what to take with us.
When I moved, I took a lot of dreams with me.
This is not an edition about my college years so I’ll just briefly touch on what I have briefly touched on before: I had my ass handed to me in college. Both in the “growing up, figuring your shit out” sort of way and in the “oh you want to do that? absolutely not, we’re gonna tell you what’s what whether you like it and whether you agree with it or not.” I could hear the shattering of my dreams on an almost daily basis.
Untangling those years is a long journey I am still on. I think when you’re young you are adamant that some of these contained years or big events don’t affect you that much because you definitely know everything there is to know about life. You are over it. It’s not a big deal. And then you get older and you realize you do not know much of anything, probably less than you did back then. You realize—not processing something doesn’t mean you’re over it.
Because during and after those years, there was another transition.
I started saying that I don’t have dreams, I have goals. I left my dreams behind.
Dreams are slippery and ethereal. Goals feel much more tangible than dreams to me. Dreams are hard to hold on to. They take time to get to; the steps aren’t very clear. Sometimes dreams are completely literal and sometimes they are fully metaphorical. Often, you don’t know which until you are far enough away to look back.
Goals vs. dreams. Lately, I’m feeling like…it’s bullshit.
There is something I have said in the last few months, obviously in my life and also here, in the newsletter. It’s something I’ll likely keep saying until everyone gets sick of it.
In terms of my life, I am rethinking everything.
Okay, not everything. I think I am in transition mode. I am coming up against a lot of uncomfortable things. I am taking stock in relationships. Although, some of those are being rethought for me without me so I’m trying to believe what my therapist said recently, that it sounds like I’m ready to let some of these things go. I am thinking about how I spend my time. I am thinking about how I want to expand my community and what that looks like. I am interrogating how I operate in the working world. I am trying to confront fears that have been slowing me down, trying to find detours around roadblocks I’ve set up for myself.
And, I realized just today, I think I am trying to get my dreams back.
Why did I decide it was either dreams or goals and not both? Why did I start to hear words like “ethereal” and “slippery” as only negative, as not realistic? Why did I start to think I’m not good enough or I don’t have the time, space, resources to actually pursue what I want to do?
Ten years ago this week, I moved to New York to attend grad school at Columbia. In playwriting. I wouldn’t say it’s the most realistic or financially sound thing I’ve ever done in my life so I must have still been attached to a little bit of a dream then. Whether I could have admitted it or not. But it was there. And at some point, I must have severed that attachment and pushed the dreams to the back of the closet.
My goals are a bit different now. In some ways they are broader and in other ways they are more defined. I think that’s natural with time and change and growth.
But I think the reason why my dreams, my actual asleep dreams, have been feeling more real lately, more like they are happening in real life, is because my brain and my heart are trying to remind me that dreams are something that can happen in real life. Hiding them back in the closet doesn’t mean they aren’t real, it just means they are hidden.
Who knows if any of my dreams will actually happen in real life? That’s part of the fun, right? Well, and the terror, I suppose. I have to stop telling myself they won’t happen at all or they will only happen a certain way.
Now is as good a time as any to just let my dreams…be.
Next week is the monthly haiku salon for paying subscribers and it’s sure to be a good one. If you want more haikus in your life consider becoming a paid subscriber. Remember, for the whole month of August, paid subscriptions are 10% off.