Geeks Vs Loneliness: when dreams don’t work out

Hello, and you’ve found Geeks Vs Loneliness, our weekly spot on the site where we talk about things that affect us, you, and people around you. Not every article has something for every person, but hopefully, you’ll find something that’s of use to you. This week, we’re handing over to the brilliant Claire Skinner, who’s talking about when dreams don’t go to plan…

Everyone has dreams. Like Princess Fiona in Shrek 2 writing ‘Mrs Fiona Charming’ over and over again, we often grow up dreaming of a happy future, perhaps involving a successful relationship, family, career, and good health. (Other dreams are available, of course – sporting success, writing a novel, playing in a band, becoming prime minister… and many, many more!)

In my teens I longed to get married one day and I often felt despair that I would never achieve that dream – I didn’t feel I was good enough, compared to everyone else. Much to my surprise, when I was 20 I met someone who didn’t share that low opinion and actually wanted to marry me. I was in the enviable position of having achieved my dream of having a kind and loving fiancé who was loyal, gentle and true. We were together for two years but it was just ten weeks before our wedding when I asked him to postpone it indefinitely. He had done nothing wrong. My low self-esteem had created problems throughout the relationship – I was so convinced he would leave me that I picked fights and drove a wedge between us.

I also developed a naïve and fruitless crush on someone else, a much older man who was nothing like my lovely fiancé. By the time I realised my mistake and wanted him back, my ex-fiancé had met someone else and he found his ‘happy ever after’ with her – decades later I’m happy to say they are still married with two children. At the age of 22, newly single, crippled with a huge sense of guilt and loss, I felt like life was over before it had even begun.

However, what I want to write about in this article is not a piece of self-flagellation about how badly behaved I was in my 20s – nothing terribly helpful there – but about dangerous it is to let the idea of a ‘plan’ for your life dominate how you behave.

You see, I had convinced myself that marrying my ex was plan ‘A’ – and by throwing that marriage away, everything in life would now be second best. The mistakes of my youth were all too common and very human but I allowed them to fuel depression, self-hatred and suicidal thoughts which plagued me for years after, even when I met and married someone new. My husband was nice but he was not the same as my fiancé – no man could ever live up to him. When the marriage broke down I beat myself up even more about things – I had wrecked not only ‘plan A’ but now ‘plan B’ too. I began to feel like my life was over – life as a single parent was somehow not a real life – it was somehow subnormal, inferior, cut off from others living in their perfect married world (I totally ignored the fact that lots of people were single too as that didn’t fit my self-pitying script!) A double bereavement – losing both my parents – only reinforced the sense of isolation and being ‘at odds’ with the rest of the world. Suicidal thoughts spiralled round my brain.

I don’t want other people to make the same mistakes I did for so long. What I have learnt is that it’s OK to have dreams – but they mustn’t become the be all and end all. We have to allow for some flexibility – for life to throw a curve ball. There is no plan ‘A’ written in the stars – there is only life, in all its messy and raw unpredictability. If we focus on what we do have, rather than what we don’t, we can find new hope and unexpected moments of joy along the way.

I’ve only really come to grasp this in the last year or so – my current mental state of relative peace and contentment the result of years of counselling, of learning to embrace reality rather than chasing a dream, and of a supportive family and great friends. It’s not always easy – my son in particular knows I still have bad days as well as good ones – but when I compare my thinking to five years ago, when thoughts of suicide went round and round my brain for months on end – I’d say life is pretty good now. As my old boss used to say, ‘never let the best be the enemy of the good’ – if your life isn’t working out how you had it planned out, that’s OK. Very few people’s lives are. Even Fiona married an ogre, rather than her Prince Charming. And that worked out pretty well, in the end…

Thanks, as always, for reading…