I have, for the greater portion of my life, lived mostly in a state of struggle.

A peculiar thing that struggle has done to me is to rob me of dreams. On the one hand many of my dreams have come true regardless but I have a hard time making new dreams or believing anything will change. Because of that, I wanted so little from the world. Now I have everything I wanted, and wanting for more seems like having a second helping when you’re already full.

I wonder if I’m the sort of person who is too scared to have dreams. Or if I’m just not ambitious enough. I am trying to dream though.

One of the ways I worked around having big dreams was just to have smaller ones. I would like a better job. I would like to lose some weight. I would like to take a vacation. The problem with these is that there are so many and many of them are actually quite difficult to achieve, especially juggling all of them at the same time. Instead of 20 small dreams, now they felt like one big dream: Get better. Get better at everything, all the time. Never stop getting better.

And for a while I shut down and stopped trying because those little dreams all started to seem too big. I know part of that is anxiety, and maybe a sprinkle of depression but some of that is personality as well. I feel bad that I have a good life and still want things to be “better”. I feel anxious that if I fail I will not be able to get back up or that I will somehow lose the progress in life I have made. I want to keep working at it though and I want to allow myself to dream.

And then, I want to wake up having realized my dreams.