Thinking Into The Future

What can you dream? Goethe said whatever you can dream, you can become. When we dream collectively, we unify and co-create reality. Look at the internet. Pretty much any idea you have and any world you seek, so you shall find. There are others out there creating the dream with you. You are not alone. Everything turns out okay.

I remember my lonely days as a child. I felt so isolated from the others. From the outside it seemed that the other children had these cookie cutter lives. Dinner together at 6pm, a specific bedtime, and rules. My home was rattling with ideas. New ideas: macrobiotic food, the concept of yin and yang, Playboy, meditation, salt water purified swimming pool, tarot cards, and Amazake. I spent time reading Dostoevsky instead of The Hobbit or Little Women, and made endless lists while multi-tasking, never completely spacing out in front of the television the way others seemed to.

I imagined that if I lived in one of my friends' homes that life would be easier. Thanksgiving would be traditional, turkey-eating dinners. There wouldn't routinely be a half-naked man with his leg behind his head, breathing Darth Vader style in my entry way when I came downstairs in the morning. "Good Morning, Dad."

I would become a teenager and have a locker instead of going to a mobile school for experiential learning in a multi-colored mini van. I would go out on dates instead of having "feelings sessions" where we shared about our feelings with the nine other 13-year-olds in my mobile class.

I would work at a frozen yogurt shop while studying for a final exam instead of packing my bags for New York City to act in a Broadway show while my parents struggled with the affair that would break up our family, leaving me permanently disenfranchised from a family base.

I would have gone to a college university instead of developing an eating disorder to stay under 90 pounds while I acted on "Cheers", coming so close to getting a role in the movie "Say Anything", but instead landing a role in the surprise cult classic "Teen Witch." I would have met some guy who was a communications major instead of flirting endlessly with actors, and I would not have gotten my self-esteem from saying NO. And NO. And NO.

I would have believed in a linear reality instead of talking to my future self, and talking back to my little self. Reminding and asking if I would really be okay.

Life would be simple. I'd get a job, get married, have babies and then....I wouldn't have to/get to make it up. Whatever I want. What is this in-between space I live in? Without walls to protect me, I had to make these imaginary thought walls. These constructs that are movable, but harder to break down than the doors my father punched holes in when I was little.

Yes. It could have been different. But as I asked my future self to guide me, she always let me know that everything was going to be okay. I am her now. So every so often, I reach back. And I remind her, because there she is. Open. Asking. Thinking. And I am here for her. "Everything turns out okay in the end." And if it's not okay, it's not the end.