Follow Your Dreams (part two)

Last Monday, we talked about how sometimes blogging can put pressure on us to follow our dreams.  It's a lovely message, everyone agreed, but what if your dream isn't the same as the one being pushed by most lifestyle bloggers out there - or if you can't yet define your dream?  It's easy to feel intimidated by all of this encouragement because it's so emphatic; we're driven towards our dreams at speed by the galeforce winds of good wishes.

So that's what I want to highlight as (part two) of this series: the idea that achieving your dreams not a race.  Last Thursday, Liz over at explore.dream.discover wrote her own post on following your dreams, and I was fascinated by the comments she received.  One of them included a sentence that perfectly captured what concerns me about all the "break free" rhetoric out there:

I think life is just too short to do ANYTHING that doesn't bring us to the highest level of happiness.

Look, I don't disagree at all, in theory.  Life is too short to be unhappy.  But it takes time to discover what makes us happiest, and I think that we often don't want to afford ourselves that space because we feel that we're not living up to expectations if we don't know what we want right now and/or if we don't start going after it immediately.

There are some amazing bloggers out there - women just like us - who have identified their dreams and followed them through with amazing success.  They've put their noses to the grindstone and made sacrifices and now are working for themselves, doing exactly whatever it is that they want to be doing.  (Almost always, these dreams involve entrepreneurship.)  We look around our community and we see that social media consultant, who quit her day job  at 25 and now has a roster of graphic design and blogging clients; we see that wedding planner, who gave up being a lawyer at 27 and now has a schedule packed with top-tier events; we see that stylist, who came straight out of college and opened her own boutique at 22.  And we think, "What's wrong with me?"

These women, these incredible women, who are absolutely to be held up as an inspiration, are not the rule.  They are the exception to the rule.  I'm only 26, so I'm not completely positive, but I'm pretty sure that our 20s is the time where we're supposed to figure out what we want.  It's a decade for us to stretch, to get comfortable in our own skin, to learn about who we are and who we want to become, both personally and professionally.  Most of us, even if we can identify our dreams, need space and time to achieve them.  (Corner office, I'll be coming for you eventually.  Stay there for me!)  And we need to recognize this, because the pressure we put on ourselves to be happy - not to be happy, actually, but to achieve "the highest level of happiness" - can be limiting.  It can keep us from exploring everything around us, from opening up to new possibilities and welcoming unexpected opportunities, because we think, "There is my dream: I will draw a straight line to it and I'll never look away."

If you know what your dream is and you know how to follow it, I salute you; that is an achievement in and of itself and I wish you the best of luck from the bottom of my heart.  But if you're not on that path - if you haven't found your dream or if you don't know how to get there or if you know it will take time to get there - please believe that it's not a race.  You'll get there.  At your own time and in your own way, you'll get there.  And you'll be happier for it.

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