Dreams

I'm struggling a bit to write anything at the moment. This week, I found out the job I love and excel at, is ending due to federal budget cuts. I didn't do anything wrong, in fact I have done extremely well. But it doesn't matter. I am a contractor, and there is no money to pay me anymore. So as of next month I am unemployed. And due to the nature of my job, the financial situation that lead to my layoff also means that there are no other jobs in my field to apply to. Unless I want to move to AK, or Idaho, WA, or other far off places. I am a homebody with a large family I live very close to. I have no interest in traipsing around the country chasing jobs when what I want to do is stay home and chase kids. Not that I want to be a stay-at-home-Mom, exactly. But my passion has always been writing, which I can do from home. So I am taking this lay-off as a sign that I need to stop being so passive about my writing and really put energy into getting published. So on that note, I'll try and write something here that doesn't devolve into an angry rant.

They say that if you give someone a fish they will eat for a day, but if you teach someone to fish, they will eat for a lifetime. But what if there aren't any fish? What if you know how to catch one, but there just aren't any to get? Well, I guess if that's the case, then you need to learn how to catch birds. But what if there are no birds? Well, learn to trap rabbits. Eventually you'll end up trying to catch the wind, but that is the nature of dreams. Dreams are tricky things and its hard not to give up on them. And even when you get them, often its not exactly what you expected. Nothing is real in a dream, so trying to bring those desires into reality creates little glitches. My dream is to be a writer, a happy wife, and mother. That's it. I don't need fancy things or a big house or exotic vacations. It sounds like a simple dream, but the reality is so far from simple. The road to getting published is a minefield littered with thousands of rejections that threaten to tare your dream to pieces. Everything I write is a piece of myself that I send out into the world. It isn't easy being so stretched, having so much of myself unprotected. I want to gather myself up, hold it in. It's safer that way. But I can't have my dream if I don't let it get ratted up by reality. It won't be what it started as. Reality will rip it, fill it with holes and wrinkles. But if I really try, maybe my dream will survive the damage and fully become real. It'll be beaten and not so beautiful, but it'll be real. And that's worth fighting for.