Dreams, Expectations and Best-Laid Plans

Writing a blog to help get me through (or even start) the day has started to become either a habit, an obsession, or a crutch. I’ve already alluded to my moderately obsessive tendencies and I’m wondering if this is a current one. This morning, I woke up later than planned again after another unnecessarily late night, but not so late that I had to manically rush around. I was feeling pretty good, even though I don’t feel especially well-rested, not just because of the quantity of sleep, but the quality. Over the past few weeks I have been experiencing random dreams, which isn’t unusual for me in itself, but is unusual because I have been having them virtually every night and am always aware of doing so, often remembering lots of the details or waking up with the lines between dreams and reality oddly blurred. Several times I have started worrying or thinking about something that I remembered had happened, only to realise with relief that it didn’t actually happen outside of my subconscious. I know that dreams are the mind’s way of collating, processing and organising our thoughts and memories, but it is evident to me from the sheer number and frequency of dreams I have been having, that lately my mind has been working overtime. It’s a little annoying, not being able to escape the things that are bothering me, even when I’m asleep. I wake up with thoughts and anxieties already formed, missing out on that blissful temporary ignorance one experiences for a while upon waking, before one remembers the events of the day before.

As I got ready for work, I was actually feeling psyched for the day ahead, despite waking with unexplainable emotions from the events in dreamland. I got ready relatively quickly and felt surprisingly alert. I was pleasantly surprised by the very slight improvement overnight in my skin, despite my best efforts at picking at and exacerbating the blemishes on my face all evening, in what is probably akin to mild self-harm. In my usual twisted logic, after doing that last night I had then made an effort to paint my toenails to make them all pretty, because, you know, everyone’s going to see my toes through my socks and shoes, no-one at all would be looking at my face.

I had time to make some tea in my travel mug to take on the train and didn’t even have to make my usual brisk walk/run the two minutes to the station. I met one of my old school friends at the station and not long after, our other friend arrived too. We had a chat and a laugh on the train, hearing about the two weeks’ jury service she has just done and admiring the new tattoo she has of the word ‘patience’ written in Hindi on the inside of her forearm. It actually looks really cool. Before she got off at her stop, she mentioned that one of our other school friends has just got engaged, which wasn’t especially surprising news, but was lovely to hear all the same. “Another one bites the dust,” I said jokingly, to my remaining (male) companion and he teased me about the pressure to catch up. “Catch up with what?” I asked, smiling at him, “I’ve got nothing to catch up with, I live by my own rules!” He laughed at me. “I like that,” he said, “I like your confidence. It helps to cover up how you really feel.” We laughed and agreed that it didn’t really bother us as such, but that it was weird seeing your peers grow up and settle down. We both get enough pressure from family or friends of the family. Maybe it’s a cultural thing? We talked about how annoying it was when people asked you when you were getting married. “Er…I’ll need to get a boyfriend first...” I said and he laughed. My favourite one is when people ask when I’m going to have children. “Well, let me explain something to you. When a mummy loves a daddy…” It cracks me up that I’m unmarried and more to the point I’m not even close to getting married, but people somehow think I should be on my way to parenthood. If I randomly got pregnant by some unknown, they wouldn’t exactly be congratulating me, now would they? Lol!

Yesterday, I had seen my friend on the train and we had been talking about getting older. “When do we have to grow up?” he asked, reluctantly. “I’m not planning to,” I answered, “so don’t even worry about it.” It’s weird how being young comes with all manner of expectations of you, but getting older has all sorts of pressures of its own. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to be in a serious relationship, I would love to get married and start having children, I would love to be more settled and more secure, financially stable, more content and emotionally at peace, I would love to be more successful in my career, more independent, and so on and so on. But people asking me when these things are going to happen doesn’t make them occur any quicker, or any more likely to occur at all. I’m not about to start doing things in life just for the sake of it, to meet other people’s expectations, to make them happy, to conform to the norm, to meet society’s schedule. If those things happen any time soon, then that’s great, but I’m not about to start forcing things to fall into place. When anything happens, it will be when the time is right for me, when God knows that everything is in its right place and is orchestrated in the way He knows is best. The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray.

The most important thing to me at the moment is getting better, to start making small changes and forming better habits gradually, so that I can be more content, more disciplined, stronger emotionally and better able to deal with all the other things life usually throws at us. I can only start there, with me; the other goals will be more achievable if I first work on myself and get the foundation right for anything else in life I hope to build on top of it. But then, I’ve always known that. It’s putting it into action that has always been my problem.