Have Your Cake, Dreamer
Why is it, we all seem to chase what we can’t have?
Is it the human condition to be so perpetually dissatisfied that we create some version of our own internal crisis; a failing relationship, a secret truth, a hidden yearning to be with someone else or become someone else entirely?
My mind races with thoughts I’ve been trying to outrun for so long. Through all the uncertainty, the unacknowledged desires, and words gone unsaid underlines a fundamental hunger for a connection. For someone to see and know me to the core. To be understood.
I toss and turn in a dream world, chasing what I’ll never have, addicted to the rush of euphoria when you whisper in my ear: what if, why not, what are you afraid of?
Imagine
The human imagination has the power to construct an alternate universe around the people and places we hold most dear. It warps our known realities into a world where we can have what is otherwise impossible — a new optimistic reality that is better and brighter than the past.
Sometimes I’ll wake in a stupor, wrenched unwillingly out of a dream about long-lost friends and acquaintances from a distant past. These are people I think about rarely, if ever. They’re all but forgotten until they emerge in a dream state as picture-perfect matches. Familiar faces, unchanged and perfectly preserved in some corner of my memory. They wander unassumingly through my subconscious mind like regulars, rather the uninvited guests they are.
The things we have pale in comparison to the things we image we could have. The mind is powerfully optimistic and tends to present us with positive potential outcomes, no matter how incredibly unlikely they are. It brings calmness and some semblance of joy just to think about this constructed universe, a world in which we get to be authors of our own destiny. Enter, the daydreamer — reluctant to snap back to a reality in which they’re so often merely passengers. Controlling our own future; the purest form of self-determination.
But all too often, these blissful dreams become torture the instant we’re pulled back into reality.
We’ve fallen into the trap of attaching to the known, to the people we’ve met and places we’ve been. Suddenly, we envision these friends could be so much more; we allow ourselves to imagine having the courage to lean in and whisper “I want you”, to pull them in, feel something again. Touches become electric, tempting flashes of what could be.
This unrelenting desire is deceptive; is it really that person we want, or merely the idea of them? Is it simply the mind’s way of personifying the human yearning for connection and belonging?
Reality
We struggle to comprehend the high likelihood that we will actually end up with someone who is, in this very moment, a complete stranger. We can picture falling in love, creating a life and a future together. But in reality, the odds of any of those yearnings coming to fruition is minuscule.
Consider this for a moment: Your circle of friends and acquaintances is infinitesimal relative the world’s population. The probability that it contains your optimal partner is slim to none. While it may seem depressing, at first, realize the hidden potential in the fact that there is someone out there who you will fall for irrevocably, and who will love you back the same: someone completely unimaginable.
Still, statistical probabilities do little to convince the imagination. Instead, consider this. Ruminating on a person from your past or present is almost certainly creating a flawed picture of reality. Applying the “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” metaphor, the obvious choice for most is to eat the cake. But what if it’s one of those insanely sugary, dry, crumbly, and dissatisfying store-bought monstrosities, disguised by fancy frosting? That is the cake that you’d rather have simply to look at and think “ooooh I want a piece of cake”, rather than actually eat it and find it incredibly disappointing.
The experience is akin to that perfect person you imagine — the ideal image, better to see, to want, to lust after, than to actually have, because if you did, you might realize the entire construct was a fallacy created by your own deceptive mind desperate for a real connection. Worse yet, you might muster the courage to act on your impulses, and regret doing so.
The next time you find yourself dreaming of someone, ask yourself, “will it taste as good as it looks?” Sometimes, you’ll have to try to find out. But in others, just save yourself the calories and dream on.
