Cost of Dreams

Life is a series of choices.

I know, serious Socrates shit right there. 

Picture The Scene

You are in first grade. You have a brand new Lisa Frank lunchbox. Your mom asks, “Do you want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or a tuna salad sandwich for lunch?” 

Well, Socrates left out this nugget of wisdom: Your answer to Mom’s sandwich question literally shapes your entire future. 

If you’re like me and you have a sweet tooth, you’re going for the PB&J. Maybe you ask Mom to get real wild and throw in some slices of banana.

You just think you’re choosing Peter Pan and Smuckers over a can of Chicken of the Sea and Hellman’s mayonnaise (Note: There is no choice between bread options, only the whole-grain, 12-seed, all natural bread is available. Mom would throw herself into traffic before feeding you a sandwich made with white bread.) 

Six months later during your trip to the dentist’s office, the man with the gray hair wearing the white coat holding torture tools discovers a nice fat cavity in your back bottom molar. Great, you need a filling.  

Why did you get a cavity? Because you’re a kid, you brush your teeth like a moron, and all the days of eating peanut butter and sticky jelly for lunch sat on your tooth and decayed the enamel. 

Who says you need to go to dental school to be a dentist? I just summed up the profession in like three sentences. 

So now, you’re sobbing as the dentist takes a needle the size of your Super Soaker water gun and numbs your poor mouth and takes a drill to get all that nasty decay out of your tooth. You’re laying there, mouth open, kicking yourself: I should’ve had the tuna salad sandwiches for lunch. 

Spoiler Alert: These choices only enlarge. The consequences enlarge proportionally: they don’t stay the same size as a small cavity filling covered by insurance. 

Your choice to go to Fancy University and graduate with a Double Degree in Philosophy and Middle East studies. When you graduate, you are shocked that no political, legal, corporate, or non-profit entity wants to hire you to negotiate peace terms in… the Middle East. 

You’re back to eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while your friends who graduated with finance degrees are enjoying company-expensed cobb salads and a martini at restaurants with cloth napkins.

Maybe you are like me. You’re thirty-eight, writing your… god, you’ve lost count how many manuscripts you’ve written to completion, or started and tossed… call it novel number five. You’re almost finished. 

Yeah girl, go chase that dream. 

That dream…it’s just so shiny and pretty…

Come on. You graduated high school twenty years ago. In everyone else’s eyes, you are still living on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams (I borrowed that from a song, thanks Green Day). And now it’s 5:13am on a September morning and you’re thinking, “Oh shit, should I do what makes sense and apply to two hundred jobs?”  

You know if you land one of these jobs, you’ll have an inevitable mental breakdown at the 90 day mark. 

To Recap:

Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches at age 7, cavities.

Bullshit Degree at age 22, no viable career path.

Novel Writing Dream at pushing 40, residing on Boulevard of “Grow Up.” 

It all comes down to choices. Ironically, I’m terrible at making choices. What to wear... Which area rug to choose for the living room floor instead of addressing real life problems… Should I swipe right or left?!

I chose this area rug. I like teal.

There is only one choice I don’t second guess. It’s the most reckless and costly of them all.

On paper, it makes sense to stop pursuing writing. The pursuit cost more than time itself. It has cost loss of income. It has cost travel plans with friends. It has also cost Friday evening bar tabs I don’t want to pay anyway. There are plenty of other sunk costs, but this isn’t an Economics lecture.

I have the choice to stop pursuing my dream of writing. 

I don’t make that choice. Even if I am living on the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.