I think I’ve spent most of my life dreaming about the future and all that my life could be, about all the things that I wanted to be. But as time goes on, it all seems to have faded. I have a confession, deep down, I have this aching desire to be perfect, I crave to embody the fantasy itself. I have grown so much disdain for the parts of myself that make me human, that I often try to carve them out of me with my bare nails. I have fallen further and further from the person I thought I was and the person I thought I’d be, until those dreams began to succumb. It feels as if they have been dead so long now that they’ve started to rot, leaving me to suffocate in the stench. I feel as if I have grown into an amalgamation of all the things I fought so hard to resist. I resent the fact that I am fueled by self-perpetuated anger and the fact that my own naivety becomes a weapon I wield to sabotage myself. I feel so stupid. What was I thinking? If only I could just think for one second, maybe I could stop making mistakes altogether. I spend every waking second clawing at my skin, peeling at it, desperate to sculpt myself into something pure to escape from the never-ending sense of impending doom and self-criticism ringing in my ears, drowning out all other sound. I look around at all that is left of me and there is no fantasy. The fantasy is dead. I will never be perfect. I am not who I thought I’d be.
That was where this piece was originally going to conclude. I wrote it on a night where everything felt like it was caving in as it so often does. I spent some time reading many of the previous articles for the Bacchus section and I realized that I didn’t want my entire piece to be about how my mind is able to swallow me whole. I had to ask myself, if all of the fantasies I had only seemed to be hurting me, maybe the fantasy version of myself I had been dreaming of was in fact not a fantasy at all? Maybe striving for all that I had desired has only been destroying me further? I find myself constantly fixating on the “what ifs” and all my own personal failures that I lose sight of all the good that exists in the present. I thought to myself, what if we can find fantasy all around us if we just take the time to look? Here’s the thing, much to my own dismay, I have plenty of flaws and have made many mistakes throughout navigating my own challenges in life. And maybe it is true that a lot of what I have previously dreamt of for myself (mind you that dream being absolute perfection so whether or not that was ever attainable in the first place is a whole other can of worms) has been lost. But I have changed. What I want out of life has changed. And if I look around, there are so many beautiful things in my life that are a dream in and of themselves. Maybe they weren’t what I had originally wanted for myself. But maybe that’s what makes them so beautiful, the surprise, like an unexpected gift. Maybe what makes them so fantastical is the fact that there is so much love, and so much beauty, that I could never have even dreamt of it all in the first place. I carry so much anxiety surrounding the future and what could potentially go wrong if I fail to maintain absolute perfection, but I am not in the future, I am here in the present, and the fantasy is now. So dear reader, I urge you to consider this alternative perspective: what if the fantasy is not dead, but in fact, is flourishing all around you and dying for you to look?
I think I’ve spent most of my life dreaming about the future and all that my life could be, about all the things that I wanted to be. But as time goes on, it all seems to have faded. I have a confession, deep down, I have this aching desire to be perfect, I crave to embody the fantasy itself. I have grown so much disdain for the parts of myself that make me human, that I often try to carve them out of me with my bare nails. I have fallen further and further from the person I thought I was and the person I thought I’d be, until those dreams began to succumb. It feels as if they have been dead so long now that they’ve started to rot, leaving me to suffocate in the stench. I feel as if I have grown into an amalgamation of all the things I fought so hard to resist. I resent the fact that I am fueled by self-perpetuated anger and the fact that my own naivety becomes a weapon I wield to sabotage myself. I feel so stupid. What was I thinking? If only I could just think for one second, maybe I could stop making mistakes altogether. I spend every waking second clawing at my skin, peeling at it, desperate to sculpt myself into something pure to escape from the never-ending sense of impending doom and self-criticism ringing in my ears, drowning out all other sound. I look around at all that is left of me and there is no fantasy. The fantasy is dead. I will never be perfect. I am not who I thought I’d be.
That was where this piece was originally going to conclude. I wrote it on a night where everything felt like it was caving in as it so often does. I spent some time reading many of the previous articles for the Bacchus section and I realized that I didn’t want my entire piece to be about how my mind is able to swallow me whole. I had to ask myself, if all of the fantasies I had only seemed to be hurting me, maybe the fantasy version of myself I had been dreaming of was in fact not a fantasy at all? Maybe striving for all that I had desired has only been destroying me further? I find myself constantly fixating on the “what ifs” and all my own personal failures that I lose sight of all the good that exists in the present. I thought to myself, what if we can find fantasy all around us if we just take the time to look? Here’s the thing, much to my own dismay, I have plenty of flaws and have made many mistakes throughout navigating my own challenges in life. And maybe it is true that a lot of what I have previously dreamt of for myself (mind you that dream being absolute perfection so whether or not that was ever attainable in the first place is a whole other can of worms) has been lost. But I have changed. What I want out of life has changed. And if I look around, there are so many beautiful things in my life that are a dream in and of themselves. Maybe they weren’t what I had originally wanted for myself. But maybe that’s what makes them so beautiful, the surprise, like an unexpected gift. Maybe what makes them so fantastical is the fact that there is so much love, and so much beauty, that I could never have even dreamt of it all in the first place. I carry so much anxiety surrounding the future and what could potentially go wrong if I fail to maintain absolute perfection, but I am not in the future, I am here in the present, and the fantasy is now. So dear reader, I urge you to consider this alternative perspective: what if the fantasy is not dead, but in fact, is flourishing all around you and dying for you to look?
