The lifespan of a dream
The Oscars and the weight of wanting something impossible
Growing up the Oscars were my Super Bowl. As I’ve written about before, at some point my childhood brain locked onto movies and thus chose the Academy Awards to be my annual destination television event. I typically hadn’t seen most of the movies nominated and so watching was more about data collection for future viewing than it was about cheering for personal favorites.
Like most people, at some point I began to fantasize about what it would be like to win that Oscar. Would I be shocked or would I be calm and collected? What would I say and who would I thank? And most importantly, how would it feel when I said those words— that it was all a dream come true.
As I grew older I began to understand more about the Oscars. I understood more about the people who were there and how many times they had been there. I learned the categories and what they meant. I learned what an Oscar campaign was and the ways in which the voting body leaned or didn’t lean. But most of all, I began to see more of the movies before instead of after.
In my life, I began to secretly fill in the blanks of my fantastical speech. It wasn’t because I was any closer to winning an Oscar but because my life had filled out. I had more memories and reason to underline the thanking of my parents. I had a wife who had in fact supported me. I have had agents and managers and worked with producers and could understand the reason for rattling off all of those names— a bit which had once been monotonous and foreign to me.
I also began to understand just how hard it is to win an Oscar. How incredibly difficult and distant, and to some extent, down right lucky, you have to be. All things combined, it can seem impossible.
This year, Mark Ruffalo went home empty-handed after being nominated four times (a delightfully silly turn in Poor Things). Hiyao Miyazaki, one of the most revered names in animation, finally took home an Oscar after what was considered to be his final film. Amidst a slew of other nominations, Margot Robbie wasn’t even nominated for portraying the eponymous Barbie. Though conversely, Celine Song was nominated for Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay for her beautiful debut film. As has become mantra for this newsletter— luck cuts both ways.
It’s easy to think of dreams as a desired end result. We tend to color them as happy endings. That if we think or try hard enough, they will hopefully materialize. We have dream homes and dream vacations and dream jobs and dream blunt rotations (for the youth)— all of which are manifestations of best possible scenarios. We romanticize the pursuit of dreams because, when awake, we have some control over the ability to pursue them as a tangible goal. We can save money for those dream purchases or make career decisions and sacrifices for that dream job. We can choose not to give up.
But we have no control over our actual dreams. They ebb and flow and disappear, sometimes sensical and more times not. They warp and twist depending on what we ate and how close to bedtime we ate it. They are funny or sad or odd and have the power to reconnect us with people we have long forgotten or have departed.
Or, if you’ve ever had a dream turn into a nightmare, and your teeth have fallen out or your legs have turned to molasses— they can be moments of mental ambush, your body weaponized against you for unknown reasons.
When sick, I was powered by the dream of good health as some ambiguous horizon. It was the idea of something that if I did enough “right”, I might one day will it into existence. So every needle prick and entombment in a scanning device became another footnote in the acceptance speech for when I would stand on a podium built out of a mountain of intravenous tubing and discarded chemo bags and say— wow, this really is a dream come true.
But as beautiful as the pursuit is, the reality of a dream’s demise is just as relatable. Because dreams have a lifespan too. Those dreams of being an astronaut or fireman or ballerina fade to black as real life steps in and offers practical alternatives. The mind and body learn and age and soon, becoming a “full-time” artist or professional athlete or some newer occupational long shot are priced out, permanently put on injured reserve, or given enough time for sense and sensibility to reform into something that is more of a sure thing.
Dreams change. “It’s part of growing up.” And that’s fine. Because the realities of life don’t demand that dreams be abandoned. Maybe that’s why they exist in a place separate from our lived existence— from taxes and laundry and illness. We (somehow) reserve an untouchable space for our dreams so that the realities of our lives can never fully erase those wonderful or embarrassing or impossible things that we pine for.
For me, a reevaluation of my dreams became a side effect of my disease. Faced with the shapeless specter of maybe-Death and then so quickly reappraised with remission-led new life— I indulged in all of those new-isms. New blood, new immune system, new love, new me. Perhaps it was also time to find a new dream.
But the thing about dreams is that while we may condemn them to depart— their true demise is beyond our control. We can wrestle with them and abandon them, but the lifespan of a dream is in some ways untethered from our desire to have them. Sometimes we can give up on a dream only for it to refuse to give up on us.
I have given up on my dreams many times. In the depths of despair, a dream can feel like a taunt. It can become an embarrassing child-like attempt to want something so far out of reach that it becomes fantasy. And in true sickness, it can feel like pure fantasy to imagine getting better.
In cancer, the collective dreams of everyone hoping to be cured are a known impossibility. Some people will and some will not, and the weight of that reality sat on my dream, sometimes jeeringly, sometimes politely, but always inquiring if I really thought that I would be one of the lucky ones.
Like so many dreams, like winning an Oscar, I wasn’t sure that it was possible until it happened.
I won’t write out my Oscar acceptance speech. But I would be lying if I wasn’t still entranced by some of that gold statue’s allure. And if I squint my eyes and remember a younger me who was always transported by the magic of it all— I think I can imagine something. Now I think it goes something like this…
I have been nominated, which is a blessing and a curse. I am now placed in a gauntlet in which I will become either winner or loser— but I am being applauded for something that I have made from nothing.
I can feel the energy and I am confused by it. I am being honored for something that is a great privilege but also as normal as breathing— which is strange because it is has been so difficult to get here.
After the nominees have been named, my childhood self watches the drum-roll and sees me tucked into the bottom-right corner of the five-way split. I know who my date is sitting next to me. I’ve tried to get my parents in as well. I know all of my fellow nominees deserve this little trophy as much as myself.
But someone calls my name and I think that I might cry. My childhood self smiles, maybe offers a yelp of excitement. I walk and try not to trip. I can feel the weight of the statue and hold tight against the impossibility of being here…
Then I say something about not being sure if I would ever make it to this day and my childhood self crinkles their forehead. My speech alludes to a subplot, something that my younger self doesn’t quite understand yet, an incongruous wrinkle in the dream that is slowly forming inside their growing mind.
But they are so happy as I stutter at the podium and that is enough to keep me going. And it is enough for me to keep dreaming of a day when I will be there.
Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week
Poor Things (2024)
I caught this right before the Academy Awards and I think it might be my favorite of director Yorgo Lanthimos’ films. IMO, Emma Stone deservedly won Best Actress for a fearless performance that wonderfully pays off the incredible conceit of “what if a pregnant woman had her unborn baby’s brain transplanted into her head— and learned how to live again in her body as an adult woman.”
It won’t be for everyone, and I can already hear my parents telling me they thought it was “too weird”, but I found a touching amount of wide-eyed hope along with all of the horniness.
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