the courage to dream in a world that is deeply hurt

and the breakthrough I had later

There are two parts of me, there’s the bubbly dreamy ambitious, bold, creative, and loving part of me, and then there’s this other part of me that’s incredibly suspicious, non-trusting, and very prone to finding everything in life absurd, ridiculous, and meaningless.

On my way to following my dreams, I sometimes can’t help but find it distracting how much I fundamentally disagree with the world I live in. it distracts me. it makes me sad. it makes me angry. it makes “following my dreams” a very pointless pursuit.

I didn’t sleep last night and maybe that’s because I don’t like the room I sleep in; every year or two I move into a new apartment so I never decorate it. I always move from one white room to another, from a plain coffee table to another rugless floor. I don’t create a home so that I don’t have to feel the grief of leaving home. but at the same time I feel some relief and freedom in the idea that my room isn’t fixated with who I am, because I am fixated with who I am, and I kinda like that the white walls are telling me to be whoever I want to be on a given day.

and as I type this I definitely think it’s more the grief of leaving a home the thing that’s driving me.

but I also think I didn’t sleep last night because it’s very hard to have a sense of peace, of balance, in a world that is deeply unbalanced.

humans can be so cruel. what narcissists are doing to the planet is devastating. it kills me to see how we use our intelligence in the wrong ways: we cherry-pick where our empathy is going. we have built a hierarchy of humans, who is more worth it, who is less worth it, whose religion is cooler. as I talk more with friends about politics, I realise how propaganda has completely brainwashed us and how we just get our information from a random 12 min whiteboard animation video on youtube and think we know everything.

being so attuned to the world has broken some relationships in my life. I used to romanticize a dynamic I had with someone until we got a bit deeper and I realised all he had been doing was listening to gary vee while eating pre-packaged noodles and watching right-wing youtube channels. I remember when gary vee was telling all of us to get through our twenties eating cheap fast food and working. I don’t know if it was his intention, but we all developed a pretty bad relationship with work.

but anyway, he’s just the result of the obsession this world has with doing, doing and doing. and having this made-up concept that progress is the new iphone 15. or the new videogame, or the new tik tok. I find that capitalism has failed to make progress in the things that matter.

I think it’s great to be ambitious and I think we should all aspire to looking back at our lives when we’re eighty and saying that was fucking cool. but these capitalist ideas also made me think that if I didn’t make it, it was my fault. that where I was born had nothing to do with it. that coming from a dysfunctional family and getting no help had nothing to do with it. that not knowing anyone in the music industry had nothing to do with it. that the rent is crazy expensive and maybe I can’t spend so much time developing my craft, but it would still be my fault if I didn’t make it.

and I have to say, I was convinced that this idea that was sold to us, was true, because what capitalism took away from me, it gave back with hope. even though everything in my life was chaotic, I was so hopeful that if I just worked hard, I would make it. I was filled with hope in a system that had failed me. even my boyfriend at the time was more grounded in reality and said “even if you work hard, it might still not happen for you” and I didn’t believe him at all. how could I? I had to hold on to something. so I subscribed to the religion of capitalism.

but this kind of hope was paired with guilt, because I was telling myself that if it didn’t happen for me, it’s because I didn’t do enough, because I wasn’t enough. and what a horrible lie that is.

having these conversations with people has also made some friendships much deeper. I saw in some of them the true, genuine intention of wanting things to be better, but just not knowing how. they stopped saying that capitalism is it, that there’s no better way of living than this. now they’re genuinely asking, what could be next? what could we do?

it’s deeply uncomfortable to know that your country supports the killings of people. that that’s the reality. you look around, some people are very engaged, others are completely unbothered. and are they less moral for being unbothered? I think so, but I also don’t think it’s necessarily their fault. we have been passing down all this propaganda for years, and now it makes sense that we’re so good at pretending there’s nothing going on. we’ve been training since we were born.

in a society where our worth doesn’t lie in our empathy, and it lies in how much we work, it is easy to look the other way, get on with our nine to fives. as long as you’re working, you’re good. as long as you’re working, you’re moral. as long as you’re working, you’re contributing. a true wonderful human of society.

☼

life sometimes feels mundane, too repetitive, too similar, and I hate it. other times I love the predictability and protection it gives me. I love knowing that every day that I wake up I will go to the same living room, eat the same tomatoes, and look at the same sky. but sometimes the repetitiveness of things is overwhelming to me. and the consistency it takes to achieve anything at all in life, makes me feel trapped sometimes.

my drive and ambition come from a very real, beautiful place. I do want to achieve things, it’s meaningful. but other times it comes from a place of wanting to prove myself to others, which is how I’m feeling lately. struggling to take a break because those days will be days of work I will lose, meaning love and respect and understanding I could lose. it’s all very sick and twisted, that I don’t feel enough, that when I do 12 hour work days I get a huge dopamine rush because I finally feel worth it. and then I crash and I commit the greatest sin of all: being lazy.

some days when I go on Instagram and I see people drinking green smoothies with sponsored proteins and working out in sexy clothes and doing biological tests or whatever that is, I feel like something is so wrong. some people can afford expensive life coaching and other people starve. some people make matcha latte and other people are killed. I know it’s a weird comparison, but it makes me ill to look at the lives we live. that meanwhile no one has any clue what’s going on in the world or whether we live in democracies at all.

I don’t blame anyone who is into wellness and does five different skin routines every day and yoga and uplifts and botox but it just makes me feel like what the hell is going on. we all need meaning and we all deserve to take care of ourselves and we all need our suplements but how did we get to this place where people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on wellness and then other people in the world are being killed? of course no one can’t live with this reality. that’s why we need cristals, and breathing techniques, and pumpkin pies. I love yoga. and yet sometimes it feels absolutely bizarre.

I definitely don’t believe in god but I know it’s taking a toll on me to not believe in anything. I think I believe in what I see. maybe I’m an empirist. I believe in the predictability of nature. always four seasons, always flowers blooming or not blooming, predictable, beautiful. I believe in the sea being chaotic and wild and then calm. I can see it, I believe it, it gives me comfort. but I don’t know if I’ve gone far enough. I don’t believe in cristals, I don’t believe in tarot, or astrology, it makes me feel shitty because I can barely connect with anyone. I’m outside everyone’s vibe. but I respect everyone’s needs for religion and spirituality. I just wish I could find mine.

☼

these past few months I asked myself, is it right to spend so much time in the day thinking about my dreams? that I want to be an artist, that I want to go to the beach and soak in the summer air, go on roadtrips, I want to write a book even. do my dreams matter when no one can afford to own their own house? or to pay rent? do my dreams matter when there are people being killed unfairly and just calling it “conflicts in the middle east”. is it fair to make the most of my privileged position living in the north of Spain?

it’s not my fault that the world is like this, and yet I feel deeply responsible. the weight of everyone’s mistakes and cruelty falls on me. writing a song sometimes feels so meaningful and bigger than me, it feels like it could start the ball rolling for healing to happen in the world, and other times I just can’t see how it matters.

and yet,

the hopelessness I feel about the world is sucking energy out of me that could be redirected into change.

my pessimism is not really useful. not when it goes on for so long and all I do is eat pastries and sit on the sofa. not when I’m suffering for nothing. With hope, at least the suffering can be re-directed onto something meaningful. and that’s what I want. to have energy to write songs and to have difficult conversations with people. to use these feelings as fuel, to have the energy to help people.

thinking that everything is pointless is part of being human. but sometimes I get to a point where I am like, no really, is everything pointless? but I’m realising that it requires a lot of strenght to snap out of that for a second and show up differently in the world. I could just sit around and feel like a philosopher for thinking that everything is a dream and that we are all really weird creatures, and nothing would come out of that.

ever since I had this breakthrough, I have been so much more at peace with the world. I think it would be useful for me to show up with hope, even if it’s delusional. and when I do feel like everything is pointless, use that intense feeling to change what’s making me so angry, or at least contribute so things can move in a different direction. I’m done with being permanently hopeless. and I’m done with feeling guilty, and done with keeping myself small because I don’t agree with what’s going on. if I don’t agree I should do something about it. I should use this for good.

My previous post was a poem about how life is like before and after abuse. how you can go from hope to complete hopelessness. maybe this gave me the gift of sensitivity, I’m not really sure yet. but that same sensitivity is why I wrote this post today too💙