I have been feeling down for a few days now and I have just worked out what it is wrong with me. I want to go back, I want to go back to being a teenager and relive my life differently. The boy that had no stresses apart from what style to do my hair, where the next fight was coming from, who's car I would drive around in that night. The joy and unbridled fun of the summer of 1990. Italia 90, laughing with mates and just generally enjoying myself. Am I having a mid-life crisis? Well I haven't got a tattoo, bought a Harley, changed my haircut or started listening to Lady Ga Ga (If I ever do that please shoot me). What I have started doing is living with regret of things I should have done and didn't. Choices I didn't make that now I wish I had.
I wish I could go back to my teenage self and offer him some advice, to follow his heart and do what he really wants to do, not what hes told to do. To stand up to people when he did things because they told him too even though deep, deep down he knew he didn't want to do them. The jobs I took, the mistakes I made. That making these choices might not work out but when he nears forty he wont live with the regret he now has of not doing them when he was younger. To sit him down and tell him that he needs to be strong and do what makes him happy not what he thinks others want him to do. Like the grandfather that talks to the child about the lessons he learnt in life. Passing on that knowledge to the younger generation and hoping they head the wise words he bestows on them, but knowing that they probably wont.
Its a weird feeling, like being trapped in very cold water and seeing people walking above me but not being able to escape because there is a thick layer of ice where the sun should be shining above me. I'm trapped and I cant get out. I see people walking above me happy, smiling and enjoying their lives whilst me? I'm drowning and no one is there to help me. To take me by the hand and lead me out into the air that will fill my lungs with life once more. It doesn't happen though and I struggle on in the water getting colder and colder. The feeling never leaves me its the same every day.
I haven't felt like this before, ever, and it worried me for a few days. The usual, off my food, lack of sleep, lack of concentration and playing old memories over and over in my mind. Decisions I made for the right or wrong reasons at the time and then looking at them with my life experience now and wishing I had done them differently for whatever reason. To perhaps be happier in my life choices than I am now. To live alone, which Ive never done, in my own flat. Me, laptop, and an idea. Writing away and getting paid for it. My idea of utopia. I don't regret my marriage or my kids they mean the world to me. I regret making bad job choices and letting my emotions get the better of me.
Something changed tonight though and it made a lot of sense. It wasn't anything anyone had done or said. I was on the train coming home and fell asleep (the usual I normally do this) and I had a dream. In this one though I wasn't drowning, I was happy. I was surrounded by my wife and kids and we were not living where we do now. It was a larger house in the country. I was sitting in the study surrounded by books, in front of me was a desk with a laptop on it. The sun was bright and shining through the large double glazed patio doors. Everything it touched it made glisten, as if there was a bulb in even the dullest piece of furniture. I was writing, on a laptop. I felt calm, more calm than I have ever felt in my life. I had nothing worrying me and I was doing what I wanted to do more than anything. Writing. I couldn't see what I was writing but it felt like someone or something had touched my soul. I felt huge satisfaction at what I was doing. As if I had waited all my life for this moment. My fingers were working busily on the keyboard.
It was like I had been visited by something that had reached out to me when I needed it most. To reassure me that I would be okay. I'm not religious in anyway I never have been, but something happened tonight and I cant explain it. I have come straight home and written this blog. No one is in and I wont tell anyone about this dream (unless they read my blog, which thankfully they don't, maybe because I haven't told them I have this blog. Its easier for me for them not to know. Sarah is the only one who does know and I want to keep it that way for now). It was like a glimpse into the future, I could see me, older but smiling and happy, my face reflecting from my laptop as I wrote. I could see my hands taping away on a laptop, the kids, playing in the garden, chasing each other around, looked older, much older, and Sarah looked even more beautiful than she does now, as she sat at the white metal table on the patio. I couldn't make out sounds or voices but I knew, just knew that I was meant to be there.
I am almost halfway through my life ( I hope). I have spent 25 years working for someone else and I may have 25 more years to go doing the same things. Travelling to a place I don't want to be, working hours I don't want to work, for people who don't take into consideration my experience and treat my like I am a fool. However after this dream tonight I'm convinced that this wont happen. I am convinced that somewhere, sometime, my life will change for the better. That I will get my chance to do what I have always wanted to do. I don't know when it will change, I have no idea but I just got the feeling if I work hard enough I will get there. Call it a gut instinct.
I'm holding onto to that with all my might. Was it my guardian angel? I guess I will never know, as I said I am not religious in anyway. I have had dreams like these before when I was a child. It was weird but when I was 12 I dreamed about my wife, I didn't know her name but I pictured where I would meet her and what she would look like, I never saw her face completely and I was sitting in a car of a person I didn't know, but the moment I saw her walk down the street it felt like I had been there before. I checked a diary I used to keep and I had written it down almost exactly. It really shook me up for a few days. Somehow though it just felt right. I feeling I cannot explain unless you have felt it yourself. You just know. Maybe one day I will tell you the other dreams Ive had about my future, that have happened, and some that haven't occurred yet. Some call it Deja Vu. Me? I am not so sure. Its something that happens to me every now and then, but what I do know is that after that dream on the train tonight I feel more positive now than I have in a very long time. Its a wonderful feeling. My dream is alive and kicking.
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