Feeling “Meh” About Your Realized Dreams

Writer and woman I admire and relate to on the internet but have never met, Rachael Maddux, wrote a great thing on her blog about moving on from music writing. It is also about what it’s like to realize you aren’t really enjoying doing the thing you always dreamed of doing, and about our former selves, and our indebtedness to them, however naive they were, because they wanted so much for us.

I love it:

It had been so long since I had considered whether I wanted to be doing this or not, and back when I did think about it the answer had always been yes, so it was a little unsettling to realize now the answer was yes anymore. But the answer also wasn’t no. The answer was “meh.” And that was maybe the scariest thing of all: that this thing I had once wanted so much even though I knew it probably wouldn’t happen — which then happened despite itself/myself, and then went actually pretty shockingly well for a while — was now something I felt “meh” about.

“Meh” is toxic. “Meh” is mean and lazy, requiring nothing other than its own assertion as a reason to give up. “Meh” is the product of festering ambivalence and unaddressed burnout. I really really hate “meh.” I hate feeling it, hate saying it, hate even just reading it. I think my former selves, who apparently are my main consultants anytime I’m debating a life-change of any sort, also hate “meh,” and would probably say that circumstances that have led me to experience extreme “meh” about something I once cared so insanely much about are circumstances that should be stepped away from.

It reminds me of a line in an essay my friend Cassie Marketos wrote about leaving her job,

“Somebody smart once said to me: “Don’t think about what you want to do, think about how you want to FEEL.”

Cassie and I worked together, and we often talked about what I called, “being held hostage by gratitude,” where rejecting something which is on the surface an “amazing opportunity” can feel crazy, and scary, and like spitting in the face of your good fortune. Are you spoiled, tempting fate? Not everyone is in a position to turn away from work that you’re feeling “meh” about, after all, but what about when you are? How it makes you feel is a wonderful thing to be able to pay attention to, even when what makes you happy is not what your teenaged self thought it would be. I mean, would 13-year-old me even understand the pleasures of taking my bra off at the end of the day, ordering Thai food, and logging onto my sister’s boyfriend’s HBO GO account? I don’t think so.

Photo: Enokson

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