Following Your Dreams

Just had a long chat with a friend from secondary school. We used to gossip over HK stars together (HK > Taiwan in secondary school days), sing songs in the classroom in the days before Kbox was invented, formed bands and tried writing our own music. Together.

Today, she sent me a few clips of the demo tapes she’s been sending out to recording companies. The past year, while the rest of us were working towards our degree in nothing we were vaguely interested in just a few years ago, she took a song-writing and production diploma, took music courses and is on her way to being the next Fang Wenshan.

I told her that my lifelong ambition is to be a superstar. Hahahaha, not the Project Superstar kind of superstar, but the globetrotting sunglasses-donning diva. Hahahaha. She wondered why I didn’t do anything about that, nor anything about my other dreams to be a writer, cartoonist, Neopets illustrator (haha). It seems to her nothing is too farfetched a dream. It seemed to everyone else around me that all that I have ever dreamt of being is beyond what I am capable of doing. Or maybe, if I ever pursued any of those dreams, I might end up on the streets in cardboard, with a big dog and a Starbucks cup in hand.

Haha. She has supportive parents and a very strong will. I hope she makes something out of this passion. 

But living in a real world forces us all to be practical. She’s going back to uni to study Computing later this year, laying out Plan B while continuing to work on song writing. 

Another friend wrote the other day:

人生就像在坐熱氣球一樣
想要越飛越高
就要把夢想一個一個的丟掉

How many dreams do I really have left? The older you get the more ridiculous it is to harbour seemingly fantastical hopes for your future. The more responsibilities, and the less time you have to pursue any of these dreams. The harder it is to put down your life and seek out something different.

I remember the first time my creativity was dashed. Haha. In primary school, we had to write on big pieces of white paper about a chosen animal. My group wrote about a parrot. So beneath a huge colourful picture of the bird, we wrote something like “I have colourful feathers and two wings. I have a beak.” I had a big plan then, a big plan to write, only at the end “Guess who am I? I am a parrot.” But before we were through to the end, our teacher came by and reprimanded us for not first identifying the creature in our little paragraph. Not the most ruly student, I guess I must have argued with her. However our dispute went, I only vividly remember putting in “I am a parrot.” grudgingly ahead of all the description. Ah, at 7 years old, that was the first time I looked down on a teacher. 

I felt I had to tell you this because I believe, to be able to follow your dreams, you need all the support you can get. My song-writing friend has the support of her parents to take a gap year before her university to work on her dream. People who deny your talents or creativity only make you give up, feel unappreciated and change your whole wondrous paradigm to believe that you might not make it even if you tried. 

The higher we go in the air, the more dreams we let go of and the more regrets we accumulate. Perhaps we should be dropping those people who don’t believe in us instead.

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