Living the dream. I have always wondered why people choose to use that response sometimes when you ask them how things are going. Now granted some people are truly living their dreams and hey, more power to them. For me though the situation is far different.
If I was living my dreams I'd be a sword wielding, flying, acrobatic, beautiful-hair-in-a-ponytail carved hunk of manawesome saving the world from robotic ninjas and fire-breathing dragons. Oh, and designing awesome games. You know, when the ninjas are in retreat and stuff.
Instead I find myself a slightly overweight mild-mannered geek dad who has never once laid eyes upon a ninja, much less fought one on top of the Great Wall of China while a horde of zombified wombats tries to break through the last defenses and ravage the remnants of humanity.
So what went wrong? When I was a child I dreamed of being an astronaut (thank you space program!). Eventually that changed to being a fighter pilot (thank you Top Gun!) and then changed to being an Immunologist (thank you National Geographic special on how the immune system works!). My dreams of flying (in space or not) were crushed by a diagnosis of asthma. My desire to cure disease survived until college where it was crushed, minced, sliced and diced by Organic Chemistry.
But wait, you might say (if you were able to locate my secret underground lair set amidst the mighty peaks of the Himalayas) you're a game designer, where'd that come from? Well what's funny is that in between dreams of being Maverick's wingman and dropping the smackdown on cancer I actually did dream of designing games. A good friend of mine and I completely redesigned the board game Risk into something much more awesome (I even submitted the design to Hasbro, though I think the fact that it was hand-written on spiral bound notebook paper that I had to rip out of the notebook to mail might have counted against me) and then went on to make a true real-time strategy board game. I even got to talk to the lead designer at Interplay back when they were one of the top game companies around. But my conversation with him is what sent those dreams to the back lot.
You see, there are very few kids nowadays that don't want to "make games". Back in my days (/waves cane) video games were still a fairly new and novel thing and as such there wasn't such a huge wave of people all trying to do it. But the story I got from the guy at Interplay is much the same story as it is now. There's no set way to become one, you have to do something else and then kind of fall into it. I know he meant well and Lord knows I've said much the same thing to some of the kids I taught, but to a 15 year old those words were kind of crushing.
What's really funny about the whole thing is that those words turned me back to my love of programming, something I had let fall to the wayside when I hit high school. When I went to college (with dreams of conquering autoimmune diseases still swimming in my head) I signed up for programming classes even though they weren't anywhere in my major. When Organic Chemistry hit me for critical damage my sophomore year, that love was still there waiting for me to come back to it.
So I changed colleges, changed majors and became a programmer. Now unless your parents put movies like Hackers on repeat when you were a kid, not many of us will group up saying "I want to be a programmer when I grow up!!!". But I loved it. It made sense to me in a way not easy to put into words. And it lead me to places I hadn't dreamed of (when I wasn't fighting Cyborg Pirates in the ruins of the colonies on Andromeda). It lead me to Minneapolis (the "Big City", I was raised on a farm in the middle of South Dakota, so anything bigger than 10,000 people is a freaking metropolis). It lead me to Seattle (ZOMG MOUNTAINS!!! OCEANS!!! ACTUAL TERRAIN FEATURES THAT AREN'T JUST HILLS!!!). And oddly enough it lead me back to designing games.
I think that lots of people maybe get too bogged down because they aren't living what they think is their dream. Life has this odd way of sandblasting things from us. We all want to fight it, to cling to things we think are important to us, but in the end, if we were all brutally honest, we'd let them go.
I could never be an astronaut, being crammed in a space shuttle for a week with bad food and bad sleeping conditions? Heck no.
I could never be a fighter pilot, I tend to go hyperbrainactive in crisis situations and a steady hand is probably best for flying planes. And also, being able to breathe under extertion helps too I hear.
I could never be an Immunologist, I simply don't have the patience for extended research (which I learned by actually doing some in a lab) and well, yeah, I hate chemistry and I hear there's at least a small amount of that involved in medical research.
Now if you had grabbed me at my high school graduation and told me these three things I would have been shattered, lost, and listless. But life stripped those things from me and replaced them with something that digs far deeper and touches me in much more profound ways.
So, although I cannot fly or do backflips and my kung fu is rather weak, my dreams are still coming true and I cannot wait to see the next chapter unfold (I hope there's ninjas).
Oh, and I do have a good ponytail and a samurai sword, so hey, I never said you had to give up on things completely.
