There is a point in the life of a dream where it becomes work. I don’t mean you dream of an actor and you become famous and it is your job. I mean the dream becomes something to work at. Something you have to spend time on each day to get yourself closer to making it come true.

Dreams don’t start off as work; they begin as a seed planted and grown with love. You can’t stop thinking about it, you smile each time you are with it. It consumes you and moves you. You think you can’t live without this dream. You make the choice to chase it and make it yours.

Then the work begins and sucks the love right out of it.

I am typically a person who works well with goals. I like to check boxes off, complete tasks in order of urgency, and carve out time to make sure it all gets done. Scheduling time for my dreams seemed stressful but I made it work and the time spent carried more value to me. I had made the time to write. I had made the time to audition.

The last year has provided a new challenge. I am at home. I am (thankfully) employed once again but I am at home. I have very little distractions during my work day and even less on nights and weekends. I started the year making a lot of writing goals, trying to get ahead. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t checking any boxes. I wasn’t carving out any time. Everything was blurred together in this weird fog of little victories, frustrations, and very little progress.

I thought at first to blame the pandemic (because OF COURSE). Why wasn’t I writing as much as I wanted to? It was stress, it was anxiety, it was living this stagnant life where the end keeps getting pushed farther away.

And it is a lot of that. But that isn’t the heart of it.

The heart of it is that I was making everything seem like work. I had begun to put immense pressure on myself to have something to show for all my hard work. I need to be published. I need to write more in this novel and write this short story and create more content and edit the novel and write more flash fiction and submit more and damn, I haven’t been published in a literary magazine yet I need to get on that. I have become my own worst enemy and convincing myself of failure before I even begin. I have berated myself with reminders that I should not call myself a writer much like I should not call myself an actor because I don’t have receipts. I don’t have proof. I don’t have the clout needed to convince everyone I am doing something with my life and I matter. I am someone. My work makes me someone.

And that is how my dream has become work.

I have written stories since I learned to write. I’ve always written in journals, written poetry, written ideas that span for pages and then die out. I’ve always been a writer.

In the last few years, I have started calling myself one and I think that’s where the shift happened. By naming myself one, I felt I needed to then prove it. Much like my work as an actor, if I didn’t have the answer to the question “So what have I seen you in?” I thought I was a failure. Now as a writer, the questions are the same: “Have you been published?” “Where can I read your work?” “Do you have an agent?” (this one is oddly the same in both mediums).

I had never stopped writing and yet now here I was, frustrated I was not marking off these writing goals when it was never something I had concerned myself with before. I could sit down and pound out 10,000 words and not think anything of it. Now, I was finding myself disappointed and angry if I didn’t achieve 1,600 words because I needed to show my work. Without the work, I was nothing. I wasn’t a writer, I wasn’t an actor. I was no one.

You don’t become a writer or an actor because you want to work your ass off. You do it because you love it. You will work your ass off, obviously. The work does matter and the work is important. But you don’t chose this life for the work. You matter beyond the work. You matter beyond the published novels and television debuts. Those matter, too. However, for me to have convinced myself I don’t matter until I have those things was not the way to go about it.

So why was I sitting here and writing because I felt I needed to prove myself instead of doing it because I love it? I think it becomes difficult when work and the dream collide. When you make the choice to pursue this as a life, a career, you put value in the achievements instead of value in the love of it. It doesn’t have to be one or the other; it can be both.

And that is where the challenge lies. You work at it because you love it but the love gets lost in the pressure that comes with it being work. I stopped marking off my writing goals and instead, when I have time during the work day or evening, I write. That’s what I have always done until I started calling it work and I am going back to it. I wrote because I loved it and it made me happy, not because I wanted to prove myself or check a box.

Turns out, I get a lot more done this way and though I didn’t make any lists, I checked off several goals by writing because I love to write and forgetting the rest.

I know this will shift back someday when my life has commuting and more auditions in it again. When I am not at home with free time swirling around me. Carving out time will most likely come back into the fold with my checklists. The balancing act will return. I’ll do my best to remember I write because I love to write. I act because I love to act. And every moment spent doing it makes me happy. It is a hard thing to remember when you’re in the throes of wanting to make a dream come true and achieve something. When imposter syndrome is breathing down your neck and you want to thrust a book you wrote in someone’s face when they ask if you have published anything.

Many of us choose to work at a dream. Dreams take work. Dreams can take time. Dreams also take love. Choosing to do it because of the love for it instead of the achievement, the praise, the marks in boxes, is an active choice you have to make every day. I fail at it often. The days I don’t fail, the days I remember, are some of the best days in this dark time I’ve had.