Whenever I watched Disney channel as a kid, there would always be some commercial short about a kid who “followed their dreams” and became a star athlete. During commercial breaks, they’d air a 90 second short documentary about a kid who worked hard enough to become a competitive bowler or gymnast or golfer, and though I wondered what eight-year-old kid would ever be interested in those things, I somehow always ended up upset that I wasn’t one of them.

Being the athletically challenged person I am, I watched those commercial shorts not just with envy or disdain, but with frustration. I was angry with myself for not setting my mind hard enough on my dreams to achieve them at a young age like those kids did. I would resent myself, my parents, my entire upbringing all because I wasn’t set out to be, well, something I’d never even thought about in the first place. (A child golfer? Really?)

I never questioned the concept of  following dreams or how they were practically shoved down my throat by literally every teacher, motivational speaker, or television program geared towards children. Everyone said it, so it had to be true: dream of it hard enough, work for it hard enough, and it’ll happen.

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That easy huh?

It’s not that I don’t believe having dreams and aspirations and following them through will lead to success. But if you go through your earliest childhood years taking that completely literally like I did, there’s a chance you’d come to notice that your doubts, dreams and fears have the power to somehow unite themselves into some weird hybrid: a drouer, or a freaout. Whatever you call it, it’s scary as hell.

So you may or may not go through most of your childhood and teenage years trying to decipher why your goals or aspirations in life frighten, excite, and sadden you all at the same time. You may or may not grow out of those feelings whenever you think about your plans in life, or what’s expected of you, or what you expect of yourself. You may or may not fail a few times. You may or may not be so afraid of failing that you don’t try at all.

Whether these things apply to you or not, there’s another option; a guarantee even. There’s a strange dissatisfaction; a hole that never gets filled no matter what you accomplish. But if you pay enough attention to yourself and what that hole craves, you’ll feed it. And when you realize it’s never satisfied, you’ll just, well, keep on feeding it.

Now that I think of it, I don’t know why the concept of following your dreams confused me so much. It turns out I’ve been doing it all along.

-Nathalie D.