Follow Your Dreams - part two

Part two is another take on the expression “follow your dreams” combined with that patronising comment your mom would always make when you copied your friend: “would you jump off a cliff if she did it?”

If we have the same dream as a friend, family member or spouse, then is it really our dream? Are we allowed to share a dream? Are we allowed to follow other people’s dreams? What if we followed them and they didn’t come with us? How important is it to follow our own dreams?

I’m sure we would all say that we would trust our own instincts and ignore what people thought if our dreams took us somewhere that others didn’t agree with, but when I think about all the important decisions I’ve ever made, I have always asked and listened to other people’s advice. I’m not sure that anything I have ever done has been 100% my own thought, followed by my own actions, resulting in my own outcome.

I’m pretty sure when I went to university that it wasn’t my own decision. I was influenced by my family, staff at the college and the pressure of society’s expectations of what someone my age “should” be doing. When I look back I don’t know why I didn’t listen to myself and stay on at the college, instead I went to university, hated it, dropped out after six months and ended up going back to college anyway and feeling like I’d lost a year.

In the drawing, the dreams are jumping off a cliff; we’ve been told to follow them but this doesn’t seem right… What if our dreams took us somewhere that we didn’t want to go? Then what? Would we give up on them? Are we allowed to give up on them? Would we change them? But surely if we change them then are they still our dreams? Are we changing them to suit us or to suit other people or to suit society’s expectations?

What if we did follow our dreams and we didn’t like the end results? What if we had an idea, made a plan, followed the plan and then at the end, it wasn’t what we expected or what we wanted and we weren’t happy? What then? Do we then create another dream? Will we always be chasing and changing dreams? How many dreams are we allowed to have? Do we have to chase all of them?

How do we even follow our dreams? So many questions! Feel free to comment with your thoughts and I might even do a drawing about them…

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