Chasing Elusive Dreams

Sandra Parshall

“Never stop trying! Never give up on your dream!”

How many times have you heard that advice? How many times have you given it to friends who are discouraged by rejection? Many established writers and other creative people say that’s the best advice they can give anyone who is struggling to break in. But is it?

Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors, doesn’t think so. In a personal essay in the June issue of Psychology Today, Burroughs cautions that “Dreams are not always beautiful things” and encouragement can keep an untalented person plugging away forever – and wasting his or her life.

His own dream was not to be a writer, but to be an actor. He thought he was good. In fact, he thought he was brilliant and would be applauded as one of the greatest actors of his day. Then he watched a video of himself delivering a monologue in acting class. He barely recognized himself. The person on the recording was not an actor. He was terrible. Hopeless. He had no talent for the one career in the world he wanted to pursue. He abandoned his dream, knowing it would never come true.

Burroughs worked in advertising for a while before finding fame with his essays and memoirs (which draw on his troubled childhood and youth and his struggle with alcoholism). He says he has no regrets about giving up his dream of being an actor. He asked himself why being an actor had been so important to him, and he realized his true goal was to reach other people, to touch their lives. He could do the same thing by writing, so he turned to a different dream and made it come true. He urges others to face the truth about their own talents and ask themselves if their dreams are realistic. If you do have talent, of course, the dilemma is more complicated. You have reason to hope for success, but you can’t count on it. You may still end up wasting your life.

Burroughs’s views strike close to the bone for me, because I spent most of my life trying to get my novels published and was on the cusp of old age before I succeeded. I’m happy to be in print now, I revel in the praise of reviewers, and I love receiving fan mail. I’m a published author. Not a bestseller known all over the world, but a published author with an audience. It’s hard for me to say all the years of rejection were worthwhile, though. My failure to realize my dream was the dominant fact of my existence for a long time, and it drained the joy from life.

If you have little or no talent, and you’re fortunate enough to experience the kind of revelation Burroughs did, giving up a dream may be easier, although it will still be painful. But the truth is that we usually can’t see ourselves clearly. A dreadful writer can read his own words and believe they are equal to, or better than, anything being published. A terrible singer can listen to her own voice and feel transported by its beauty. Aspiring actors like the young Burroughs have to depend on others to let them perform, and if they can’t find work they’ll eventually be forced to give up, but they may live out their lives with the bitter belief that their talent was overlooked.

These days it’s easy for writers and singers/musicians to bypass the gatekeepers and offer their work directly to the audience. Those with talent will probably be noticed. Those without will suffer criticism and poor sales. But will that be enough to kill their dreams? In most cases, I suspect, it won’t.

Have you struggled to make your dream come true? Have you ever wondered if you should give up and move on to something else? Have you ever tried to make someone else see that it was time to give up?

When I Grow Up

Elizabeth Zelvin

Writer Patricia Harrington says she “was told once by a psychologist: Ask a woman what she wanted to be when she was nine years old, and for a boy what he wanted to be when he was twelve years old. There will be elements of that desire or avocation later in life.”

Pat herself is a professional grant writer and mystery writer. She uses the idea that childhood aspirations mirror in some way, if they don’t duplicate, what people do become to develop characters in her mysteries. She says she “asked an Episcopalian bishop what he wanted to be at twelve. He answered, ‘a baseball player, and to play second base.’” She thinks his status as a suffragan bishop (“an assistant or subordinate bishop of a diocese” according to thefreedictionary.com) echoes the childhood dream.

Pat says she asked a public housing tenant “what she wanted to be at nine, and she said, ‘a hooker’. Made me wonder....” In fact, I’m less shocked, however saddened, by that response, than many would be because of my years working with alcoholics and drug addicts who ran the socioeconomic gamut from homeless to rich and privileged. The premise did make me want to know more about what people wanted to be when they grew up. So I asked the question on Facebook. It turned out to be more popular than many of my posts, but most the responses it drew were not quite what I expected. In retrospect, I was hoping for discrepancy rather than correspondence, along the lines of “wanted to be an astronaut...became a lion tamer.”(Come to think of it, there is a common thread in that pair: a tolerance for high risk.)

Some of the kids’ ambitions were imaginative:

“An opera singer & surgeon. At the same time.”

“All I wanted was to be a teenager like the girl down the street who I thought looked just like Annette Funicello.”

“I wanted to meet Roy Rogers & Dale Evans and have them come to the Bronx with their horses.”

“I wanted to be Dallas QB Roger Staubach. The only thing we had in common was I had concussions too.”

From a woman: “I wanted to be President of the U.S. I’ve since regained my senses.”

“At 9: mother of 12 kids. At 13: truck driver.”

Sounds like this last woman also regained her senses. I can’t tell you what she does today, because all the information on her Facebook page is in Finnish, a language that is known for bearing no resemblance to any other language (except Hungarian and Estonian; Basque is the language with no living relatives at all).

Many of my Facebook friends are writers, along with mystery-loving librarians and other readers, and that probably skewed the results. But quite a number of the writers have wanted to be writers since childhood. Of course, in today’s economy and publishing climate, many of the writers have other jobs as well. Mystery author Vicki Lane, for example, wanted to be an archaeologist as a kid; besides teaching and writing, she’s been a farmer for the past 36 years. Digging in the dirt...digging in the dirt. Makes perfect sense to me.

I’m one of those who wanted to be a writer from well below the age of 9. Of course, my plan was to become a published novelist at 24, not at 64. But luckily, writing is an occupation in which ability is not confined to any particular age group. In a creative residency I participated in a few years ago, all the composers of postmodern music were in their early twenties, the visual artists mostly in their thirties; the writers ranged from 20 to 62.