DreAmbition

Yes, it does matter what you have experienced. What it has done to you and still remains to do. What place it occupies in your life now, and how it has shaped you into the person you are today and would want to be someday. You want to know that someone cares. Someone who loves you for who you are. Who understands that you do not necessarily understand all of it yet. That it sometimes lacks chronology, explanations, and whatever it may be that is called logic. Filled with uncertainty. This is your truth, what matters now, and how at this moment you need to let it happen. It needs to get out: put it OUT there.

As a teenager I got the stage several times for expressing my story in the language of sentiments. Speaking poetry in front of an audience of hundreds. However, it seemed that perhaps no one really understood me. As a loner I appeared and disappeared from the temporary spotlights. The applause and prizes in vain. Until that one rainy day, when my history would strike a different path and everything would change. After a literary event, I sat next to a classmate in the bus on the way back to school. Later, other people would wonder what at first sight the two of us in god’s name could have in common. But we knew, how in one hit at that moment we had found a common feeling that united us in our personal quests. Similarly, more people would follow, who came to play important roles, each of them needed for a missing piece of the puzzle, further growing in togetherness. However, most of them turned out to be impermanent chapters, wherein eventually our paths would separate.

This happening where once allowed people have to be let go of again, does not make it easier to dream without fear for a subsequent nightmare. Some have trampled upon your soul, when you finally dared to show it so tenderly and to open it up. Showing yourself remains a risk without the guarantee of being seen with care. A deep dive into unknown darkness. Nevertheless, this does not directly mean a rejection of you, and it may be that others were often many times more intensely afraid than you were. Despite the grotesque promises many turn out to be unwilling or incapable of facing the confrontation with their own baggage, where you could have been for them the possible embracing space of salvation. Non-understood open endings leave behind a bitter aftertaste, but perhaps a slight consolation is that these people usually did not know what they were doing and were troubled by that even the most.

I am grateful for the people who would come later on my path, with whom I would be able to limitlessly keep refinding, releasing, and reinventing my old self, for an appreciated new one. Where I used to think that for being an important person I would have to travel the world, the various directions of the wind come to me now. It feels like a reward for having remained faithful to myself, in spite of the uncertain challenges. You, in whom you ultimately kept your faith, whom you did not want to abandon and wanted to offer healing, whose dreams and ambitions you wanted to make come true, which you felt you deserved. Strong, brave, and loving enough, so the magic of rare connections with others still took the upper hand. Where the roads between heroic hearts cross, liberation gets intertwined with commitments.

Perhaps the biggest possible need and quality in all our developments is to be seen in this way as human beings. As natural and important as breath and nutrition for our bodies. How can it be that there are so many people who in their old age after marriage, children, career, migration, disease, and even close to the hour of dementia, once more remember crystal-clearly their most passionate and tragic love affairs? Freedom is not just simply a supposedly picture perfect of the house with the white fence and domestic animal. All of this is NOTHING without the daily touch of recognition and acknowledgement. Due to which I can feel more self-confident and happier than ever before. This too is an open ending, which simply is inescapable, but the best possible one I want to go for.

No, you don’t have all the answers either. But will you stand by my side, for as long as we try to find out? Laugh together, cry together, to leave the grim smiles behind. That you don’t know it all yet, doesn’t mean that you don’t need from time to time an essential warming hug, soothing shoulder, or powerful healing and inspiring word. You still deserve the realisation that you don’t have to feel uncomfortable about yourself. And that other people who truly matter, will neither do so when showing you understanding and affection. Not for egoism or sacrifice… You see, through your openness you give something priceless back. The possibility to therefore also dare and be capable of showing myself. The relief and intimate gift of vulnerability in trust. Express and share your story about the past, present and future, and I will be there with you. That will make all the difference.

Photo © Andrea Huls