to dream medium
I made the mistake of logging onto Facebook just now and had a quick scroll through my feed. Immediately I was hit with updates of acquaintances studying abroad, getting married, being featured in articles, and achieving dreams they told me about when we were high school classmates. In the minute I spent scrolling, I felt a cocktail of emotions, including but not limited to jealousy (of course), happiness (specifically for the designer classmate who now works in editorial fashion), and disgruntled confusion (I barely know this person, so why am I seeing this + supposed to care).
It was a nice reminder that Facebook is still just as psychologically damaging to me as it was when I stopped using it in college. But seeing all these people achieve these big things they worked towards1 also made me realize that I've forgotten how to be ambitious.
Embarrassingly, my last frame of reference for an ambitious Mei was me in high school, when all I wanted was to go to college abroad. I did all the research and attended all the conferences and took all the tests and made all the lists. It became part of my identity, and I would talk to anyone who asked me about it. My determination outweighed any fear I had about not making it, or it turning out not to be what I'd hoped. I was so sure that I would go and that it would be a worthwhile experience—and I did, and it was.
These days, I'm not sure if there's anything in particular I want that badly. I'm technically "in school" already, so I'm not really looking to go to grad school, and don't even know what I'd want to study. Like a lot of people my age, I don't have a dream job. I'd like to move somewhere fun, but have convinced myself I need to figure out the school/work thing first. I have passions, like drawing and writing, but have learned so much about the downsides of pursuing a creative career—both full time and even as a side gig—that I've placed art staunchly in the "hobby" category, which has led me to stop investing time and effort into it with intention.
Whenever I get in my head like this after looking at social media, I try and remind myself that I live happily, and don't need to share grand conventional achievements to acquaintances I don't care about for it to be true. Which is true!
But I'm coming to realize that I miss wanting things with my whole heart, for me—not for anyone else. I miss working towards something and being so sure that I would get and love it, even if I didn't have all the details figured out yet. I miss being a threat to my own anxieties, and being the walking embodiment of "I'm going to get this thing and I'm going to like it no matter what." These days I am so meticulous, always needing to know every single detail before saying yes, so scared of things changing. I miss the (definitely naive) confidence of knowing I would be able to spin things my way even if they didn't align with my expectations, even if they changed me, because I knew it would be for the better. It's something I liked about myself before and wish now I could see in action again.
I've been playing catch-up with schoolwork and having great hangs (today I met up with Kayla, which was a fun event that deserves to not just be an aside in a mostly spirally post), so have yet to sit down and write all my wishes for the year. But I know as early as now that one of them should be to retrain the muscle I have for dreaming—not big, necessarily, but even just medium. Something like that shouldn't be impossible just because I'm no longer a kid. If my justification for that blind ambition is that I didn't know enough about the world, that doesn't hold much water—how arrogant of me to assume that I know enough about the world now, at the ripe old age of... twenty-five.
Realistically, I probably was not as single-minded in working towards my goals as I remember myself to be, if my high school social media full of bandom, cartoons, and k-pop is any indication. But that's reassuring too—to know that the small, "petty" delights I enjoy full-time these days don't have to all disappear in the pursuit of something larger. I hope I can remember that, even when this Facebook jealousy-induced fire inevitably shrinks in intensity as the year goes on and I start to settle back into comfortable stasis. I don't expect myself to be on forever, but I'm writing in the hope of having something to come back to whenever my fear keeps me from wanting things.
If anyone is reading this, I hope you let yourself want things too. If you already want things, I hope you get them.
Except getting married, I guess? I know a relationship is work too, but it seems more out of your control than any personal or career goals, lol.↩