Another Train To A Bigger Dream

It’s another train to a bigger dream.

While sifting through the aftermath of a financial disaster of a year, we started asking big questions. At first they were just questions about our finances and our future and what all of that was going to look like in the years ahead. The kind of questions you start asking when you have a kid and become responsible for someone’s life. And, not to shock anyone, but LA is an expensive place to live — 6th most expensive city in the world, to be exact. With wanting to do most of the raising of our daughter ourselves (without having to outsource a ton of help just to cover rent) what exactly does that look like for us? Furthermore, are we killing ourselves just to be in LA? And if so, why? Do we really love it that much or is it just what we know? Is it a landscape to which our personalities have become tethered because it is familiar? 

What began as a simple desire to remedy our bank accounts and be responsible adults, soon turned into the unearthing of many buried dreams and the hatching of a new plan for our future.

Since I was 12 I knew I would one day live in Los Angeles. My 7th grade teacher handed me the Weetzie Bat books by Francesca Lia Block, a compilation called Dangerous Angels. And those stories about Weetzie in LA with her Secret Agent Lover Man and their babies, and Grandma Fifi’s magical cottage…it was like looking into some kind of oracle. And I just knew. I knew then that my life was waiting for me out there, all the way on the other side of the country. 

And it was, I was right. But when you dream about the future, you get ideas about how it’s supposed to look. And sometimes you get stuck on those ideas. I certainly had a lot of  ideas about being a famous actress someday. Though it’s been more than a decade since letting those go, there is still, sometimes, some grief. Though I know they are not the dreams of my current self, a part of me can’t help but to think of those dreams as broken, as failed. It’s as if I have let down the girl whose dreams they once were. 

So now I’m sitting here, sorting bills and I’m wondering, well what now? What do we want to be doing? Where do we want to be? What is the dream now? And if I’m being completely honest, whatever it is, I don’t think it’s tied up in Los Angeles as it once was. And that kind of scares the shit out of me. I’ve built my life here. Met my husband here. Birthed our daughter here. Formed some of the most meaningful friendships of my life here. And again, there is the nagging allegiance to the girl who climbed mountains to be here. So the question is, if I choose to go, am I leaving her behind to wander like a ghost amidst the wreckage of these so-called failed dreams? 

For a time, a darkened silence pulses around me.

Then the answer gallops into my throat, splits me open and sets flame to the acres of fear that once lived there—

Those dreams, of that girl, are neither failed nor broken. They were the vehicle that got me to the station. They were the fuel I needed to meet my future self and all that lay beyond. She will not be left behind because she is boarding the next train with me – another train to a bigger dream. 

Sometimes we can’t see the big dreams because we aren’t ready yet, so we have to hitch a ride on smaller dreams in order to arrive there. We have to let go of how we thought it would look and trust that something much more beautiful is up ahead. Trust that the dreams we once had were exactly what was needed. Trust that sometimes change is the medicine that will dance us into a new orbit where our deepest desires are waiting to welcome us home.