building self trust

When a person spends nearly half a life lying to herself by "staying positive" it is hard to get to a place of self-trust once you wake up to the lie. How to discern between a "fantasy" and a "dream" becomes confusing.

If I have learned nothing else this past year it is that one cannot actually live very well without some dream of what is positive and good about the future. Yet, when faced with the stark reality that one has made up stories and fantasies about the future and what is possible, out of a stubborn determination to look at only the bright side of things when in reality they weren't going very well at all and the future possibilities were really never going to happen, then that dreaming becomes very challenging indeed. I wonder if this can make sense to anyone who has never been in an abusive relationship?

The challenge of re-learning how to dream without layering fantasies over reality is such an opportunity to find the center of one's being. For a true dream grows organically out of reality, the reality of the present moment. A dream can help you make a quantum leap so to speak out of that present reality, but only if there is some resonant recognition within the reality that the dream can grow from. So many of us spend our lives banging our head against our own dreams because we can't get that resonance to happen, because there is no seed of the dream in our present tense garden.

I get totally overwhelmed these days when I try to dream the way I used to dream. I used to dream so big and really almost get high off of that dreaming, but really that dreaming was all fantasy because my reality in the moment could not nurture such adventures to growth. I realize now that a true dream is a step-by-step adventure, even when it is a quantum leap or appears that way to the outside world. A sustainable "overnight success" has been years in the making, grounding its roots deep within the moment, each moment along the way.

Now, I can only dream a little ahead of where I am now and feel "safe". Perhaps with time, I will learn to trust myself to dream out further to the future. Now it is enough to dream of the house that I will move into next week, and how to accomplish supporting myself just in that house, just in that part of my life...