Do you Dream or do you do?

You’re not really living if you’re not taking risks. Do you follow your heart or do you play it safe?

Many of us live on autopilot, ticking off items on a to-do list as we go along without even asking ourselves whether this is actually the life we want. As long as it’s comfortable and meets expectations, be they ours or those of others, it’ll do.

And so we settle for safe choices either because we lack the imagination to come up with alternatives, or out of habit.

Given enough time, the human animal will adapt to even the most adverse and destructive of circumstances.

You can live with chronic illness, you can live with loneliness, you can survive on little, you can even live without a sex life and remain standing.

Eventually, familiarity will turn discomfort into a comfort zone of sorts as your brain accepts what little it is offered.

This is how I lived for five years as major depressive disorder took hold, stalled my life, and proceeded to destroy my career and obliterate my marriage. But even though my writing voice was gone and with it my livelihood, I never stopped pushing back.

I refused to capitulate and let depression defeat me. I refused to accept illness as an inevitability. I refused to let it become a habit or an excuse. Instead, I saw the captor in my head as a nefarious element that needed either taking down or bypassing.

But since chronic illness is something you never get rid of, I’d have to outsmart it with whatever tools I had, namely a broken brain that wanted me dead.

Plus editorial skills that had gone AWOL.


And still I dreamed.

I spent a lot of time revisiting my past and asking myself how I had managed to cram so much life experience and so many countries into so little time. Or how I had managed to keep going under duress. Or why I had let depression force me into an ascetic life devoid of what made me me.

And then I started imagining a different, functional future where I had not only recovered my writing voice but was using it to save myself. That vision was so impossible it became compelling and soon occupied my every thought.

Because this is my vocation, I’ve always placed my trust and faith in the power of words and believed I could write my way out of anything.

But belief is useless and even downright dangerous if not backed by evidence, and vocation ceases to exist the moment you no longer practice it.

After a five-year hiatus, I had become an empty shell without my raison d’être.

Depression had alienated me from myself but it hadn’t completely destroyed my ability to remember. My past contained all the clues I needed. What I had done before I could likely do again; there had to be a way, somehow.

My heart leaped at the thought of diving into words even though there was every chance I’d sink, as I had almost every time I tried over five years.

Then again, what if I managed to float or even swim instead?

Seeing possibilities where none exist is something only the heart can do.

Reason is too down-to-earth, too analytical to entertain flights of fancy and project itself into a made-up dimension. Lean on it too much and it’ll quickly override intuition and dreams.

While doing the sensible thing is safe, it can also make you miserable when you realize you’ve settled for something that doesn’t quite fit.

Choosing to cut yourself off from the people, pursuits, and places that make your heart glad is a form of self-abuse. You can’t grow in an infertile soil. At best, you stagnate; at worst, you wither.

For five years under the yoke of depression, I withered.

I tried to accept my life had come to an end because it felt like it. “You’re dying there,” a friend told me once and their words rattled me to my core. It only took them a couple of days to understand what I couldn’t, it was that obvious.

By then, I was writing again, trying to hold my own despite many false starts and failures. But other than keep cranking out words, I didn’t really have a plan. When my beloved stepmom was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer diagnosis, I had to come up with one, and fast. Not only did I need to find a way to get back to Europe, but I also needed to figure out how to move back to the EU until the end of 2019.

After earning my first transatlantic airfare through writing and fundraising to cover associated expenses, I spent three months in Paris and I’m now working on the next step, about to fly back to Europe. Regardless of constraints, limitations, and the general complexity of such a task, it had been a while since the last opportunity to grow and evolve presented itself.

And so I’m back to doing what I had always done before depression: listening to my heart for hints and suggestions.

After being silent for so long, it has a lot to say.

There are many risks associated with living a non-standard life.

Then again, my life to date has been rich in experiences precisely because I never shied away from diving head first into the unknown. My motivation has always been the same: I might learn something new. This reasoning hasn’t failed me yet.

Curiosity guides me. I am happiest when I can combine it with vocation and earn a living because my work is my life and vice versa. To me, the two are undistinguishable from each other. This sometimes lands me in trouble, which in itself is always a learning experience I can turn into story material at a later date.

Processing time varies wildly however, depending on the amount of trauma involved.

And yet, nothing ever gets lost as long as I can remember it, not even five years worth of crushing depression. It led me to take the biggest risk of my life to date, out myself as mentally ill, and write about all the unspeakable consequences of chronic illness and hardship because journalism is what I do.

I never expected to turn the pen on myself until I realized it was the only way forward.

Whether this approach will act as a repellent to HR departments, I have no idea yet. All I know is that there can be no balanced life by omission, and concealing mental illness only serves to perpetuate stigma. Silence kills, and I’m lucky to be alive.

Since journalism is service, I’m doing nothing more than my duty.

I also have a new mantra:

Do not let life pass you by.

 While I will never get those lost years back, I can do my best to prevent more of the same.

It means I need to keep pushing myself every day and embrace the discomfort of having no clue what happens next. If we’re being honest, none of us do although we often like to pretend otherwise.

What are dreams but notifications to take action?