How to Resurrect a Dream

When I was about to graduate from Smith College in '01, I sat down with a counselor in the Career Development office. "What's your dream job?" was a question she kept asking me over and over...

At the time, this was a question I could not answer. I was in the middle of completing a full-year's honors thesis (which had been a dream of mine) and had recently received the papers that finalized my divorce (which had been my full-blown nightmare.)

If you've ever gone through a divorce, you know that divorce signifies the death of a dream. Marriages are always the cradles of our hopes and dreams for the future. Rarely do we omit our spouses--and their welfare--from our future plans. Divorces signify the death of those dreams and of that future. With a divorce, what was once "we" now becomes, again, "I"--which may be, at the time of the divorce, a forgotten concept. It takes time and healing for us to be able to re-formulate new dreams for a new future without that person who had, for however long the marriage lasted, been an integral part of our dreams.

So there I was, sitting in the Career Development Office, still processing the death of one dream (my marriage), and coming up on the completion of another (my honors thesis) and being asked to form some sort of Life Plan (another buzz term) by imaging my Dream Job.

Needless to say, I got a bit of a brain cramp on the whole exercise. I simply could not imagine what sort of job I could, or should, aim for. I was not sure who "I" wanted to be, because I had spent so many years, in marriage, thinking about where "we" were going in "our" life together. And the sense of who "I" was at that moment--a student who had just completed a very challenging honors thesis--was about to end (in a sense, "die.")

Since Life was unstable, I felt the Dream was impossible. Career counselors encouraged the Dream, and offered no strategies for the Life. What I heard them say was that if I pursued the Dream, Life would fall into place. My disorientation from so many dream-deaths, however, (and a practical lack of funds) left me desperately needing Life and a Sense of Place more than another Dream that might end up dead.

So, I worked diligently, and with the support of friends, put together the Sense of Place, and the Dream Job ended up somewhere below my emotional radar. I worked a number of survival-jobs, including temp work, retail (that I was oddly quite good at), and even dj-ing (for a short time.) Any of the Dream Job ideas I'd had years ago before marriage were surfacing in my consciousness, but I didn't want to have to move from the place I was building a Life in order to attain the Dream.

I only started Dreaming, in full, again after I felt a sense of stability with my Life.

As I was reading Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail, something in the Acknowledgements jumped out at me: "No project like this could be done without a strong partner."

Building my Dream Job has been, I realized, something like a project--and even before I could articulate it to others, I knew I would need a strong partner to help me get it done. I knew that I alone could not formulate a strategy for the Dream Job without someone who also believed in that Dream.

I had a sense though that, as a woman, finding someone to support my Dreams might be difficult. I think that's why women often told to gird their loins and pursue our dreams without that strong partner.

It doesn't help either that women are often the supportive strong partners to successful men--and, when you think of the economics of the world, this makes sense. Men still are, after all, the breadwinners in a World that is constructed to reflect their sensibilities and desires. Most of us women are raised to be the soft place for men to land at the end of the day. We seem biologically designed to Nurture. Dream Jobs and big Careers don't appeal to us in quite the same way as they appeal to men.

Unfortunately, I got a dose more of ambition than I did of nurture....it's a problem at times....

At middle age, the nurture dynamics can shift. Some men in middle age, who've achieved a level of success they are comfortable with, who may have made peace with their dreams never materializing, or have actualized many dreams, find that they want to support a woman's Dreams. Often they end up with younger women, whose dreams they support while the presence of a younger woman flatters their vanity. But, that's not always the case.

Steady Eddie and I have a 10-year age difference, but I doubt that my "younger woman" status has much to do with why he supports my dreams.

I think it has more to do with the idea of being a strong partner. He has a quiet emotional strength, a strong sense of fairness, and a generous heart that make him good strong partner. He enjoys my daring-do, my chutzpah, and my abilities. He's watched me collapse into myself, and struggle to find the way up and out. From this, he's learned how to help--the way he helps when we are hiking and I can't negotiate going up a mountain.

Sure, there are things about me that still befuddle him, but he sees how hard I work when I'm not even sure where all the work will take me. He admires that determination.

Dreams, though, are problematic--sometimes they're as well defined as a mountain, sometimes amorphous like fog.

He's willing to go with those ups and downs in my life--they don't seem to shake his life at all.

I think if I were asked again "What's your dream job?" I don't think I could give a pat answer now any more than I could 5 years ago when I sat there, disoriented and in mourning, in the Career Development Office. I have though, stopped mourning. There is a strong partner, and a soft place. There are the seeds of a Dream...and that is enough for now.