What Dreams Are Made Of
Growing up, I saw myself as a blank canvas. As a Korean adoptee relinquished at birth, I didn’t know anything about my birth mother, birth country, birth culture, or history. As I grew up, that was painful, and it became an aching loss I didn’t know how to grieve for 30 years, but there was also this incredible gift because I was able to experiment with defining who I was without any preconceived notions.
To make up for the lack of genetic mirroring, I imagined myself in the fiction characters I read about or watched in movies. Characters like Bette Midler’s CC Bloom in Beaches or Jessica Lange’s version of Patsy Cline in Sweet Dreams. I spent hours mimicking these women at the ages of 5-8 years old, learning the nuances of the notes and lyrics to each song and pretending I was up on the stage with the lights shining down on me. I learned much later that I was really loving the parts of myself I could see shining back at me in their image.
Over the years, I carefully curated every aspect of my identity into a masterpiece that could be admired from afar but wasn’t real because I wasn’t being vulnerable or building deep relationships based on intimacy or feelings. So when that masterful identity came crashing down in my late 20’s, it was painful, and another loss.
I was suicidal at the time, but I had many years worth of knowledge in how to recreate myself from the shattered pieces. Because I had started out as a blank canvas, I was familiar with the process of identity creation and had been using these gifts my whole life, so I was able to recreate a sense of self from the shattered pieces.
When that recreated identity exploded in my early 30’s again, amidst the trauma and the heartache, I was also excited to be another blank canvas! I vowed to create myself again in a way that was real, and if less masterful, with a greater capacity to experience what it means to be human this time.
But that little 5-8 year old girl still craves the shining lights and the ability to belt out long, lilting lyrics.
I took advantage of the opportunity The Awakened School presented at the Advanced Speaker Training karaoke party, and 35 years later, I got to become that first story I imagined myself being as a 5 years old watching Beaches over and over and over again on a VHS tape! I also got to sing a Hilary Duff song from the Lizzie McGuire movie that came out when I, like the character, was graduating from high school. I wanted to be like her and have those stage lights and my high school class cheering me on from the crowds. Although it was business school colleagues, it was not unlike that scene. . .which was a reminder that dreams really do come true in ways that we don’t see when we’re dreaming them.
