Six weeks.

That’s how long my friends advised me to take off after comprehensive exams. With a mind and body as weary as mine was after writing, defending, revising, and, oh yeah, getting COVID in the midst of that, I decided that six weeks suited me just fine.

As it was, my six weeks of recovery time fell right as winter break started. For me, winter break is a flurry of travel and activity, so I kicked off my 6 weeks by spending 47 hours in the car (33 as a passenger and 14 as a driver).

With an empty brain and not many options for in-car recreation, I turned as I often do to daydreaming. As long as I can remember, my biggest dream has been to live in southern California by the coast, spending my days taking in the sights, sounds, and feel of the ocean. The older I have gotten, the more this dream feels like it will never materialize to be anything more than what it is; a dream, not a potential reality. The price of housing and slim availability of jobs both weighed into this sad recognition, but reality should never get in the way of a good daydream, so in the car I let my thoughts turn from the dreary winter Midwest sights outside my window to the wide open coast.

In this daydream, I live in a modest studio apartment in Long Beach. I wake up each weekday morning and start my day early, heading upstairs to the rooftop pool to swim a few laps before going to my job at a university nearby. On the weekends, I wake up slowly and make a fresh cup of coffee that I put in a travel mug and take with me for my walk along the coast. My walk along the coast is a group affair, with a few older single retired folks, a young lesbian couple, and other misfits making up our ragtag walking group that meets each Saturday at 9 am. My weekends are spent mostly on or around the water and my evenings consist of spending time exploring the local nightlife, including lowkey wine nights, poetry events, and art fairs with my cool faculty friends.

Another daydream that has taken up my mind lately includes my ideal life in Seattle. While I have not given up on living in Long Beach, some of my desires and sensibilities have shifted the more that I have grown and been able to travel. Seattle, like most of coastal southern California, is also outrageously expensive, but somehow feels a bit more accessible. Thus, when I tire of cool ocean breezes and California sun, I shift my daydream to a more rainy place where the cobblestone streets sparkle under the lights of Pike Place Market.

In this daydream, I wake up early every other weekday morning and bundle up for my short walk down to Pike Place Market. As I come into the market, I wave hello to the men working behind the fish counter and the man selling the flowers before I arrive at my favorite coffee shop where the barista greets me by name before getting started on my “usual” (an oat milk latte with lavender). After getting my latte, I spend a few hours working in the shop before heading home to grab lunch, go grocery shopping, and prepare dinner for my family. On other weekdays, I make my own coffee at home before hopping on the Link Light Rail to head off to my job either working at local worship spaces or the local college. These “in person” workdays allow me the time to read on the train, opening up my cheesy rom-com on my iPad as the city, bay, and gorgeous pine trees zoom by outside my window. On the weekends, I spend time with my family. Soccer games, museum trips, and rides around the carousel combine with more relaxed weekends full of cuddles on the couch and small trips to the market.

These daydreams provided me a great way to pass the time on my trip, but as the days wore on and the new year loomed, it became increasingly difficult for me to keep my daydreams in the realm of imagination and instead I found myself trying to create concrete plans of how to achieve my daydreams. While this does not seem like a problem on the surface, it soon became clear to me that there are more than just financial barriers standing in the way of me reaching my goals. Unfortunately, the biggest of these barriers turned out to be myself.

This may sound counterintuitive; if these are my daydreams, my life goals, what reason could I possibly have for holding myself back? Well, as it turns out, the person that I am in my daydreams is far different from the me that exists in real life. This difference, between daydream Delaney and real Delaney, is not problematic as long as I keep my boundaries between the two clear. What becomes problematic is when I try to make plans that align with daydream Delaney, forgetting that real Delaney would absolutely hate what daydream Delaney would love.

Let me provide a few examples.

In the California daydream, I talked about evenings spent out on the town-- I hate going “out on the town.” In my daydreams, it seems like the real “dream” piece of the scenario is not so much the city or the lifestyle, but who I am in relation to these different pieces. Real Delaney is an introvert who never really drinks and hates going to social events. California daydream Delaney has no anxiety, a lot of money and time, and seems at ease in bars and at poetry events.

In my Seattle daydream, I am a regular at a coffee shop, something I have always aspired to be. Real life Delaney loathes spending $6 for a coffee that they could have made at home and is never awake early enough to buy coffee before work anyway.

It is comical, how different daydream Delaney is to real Delaney. It also makes me wonder, is the escapism and joy I experience while daydreaming about the scenario, or is it really about being someone else? Am I escaping College Station or am I escaping the way I live in College Station? After some failed planning and subsequent reflection, it appears to be the latter. If I wanted to be a regular at a coffee shop or go to fun poetry nights, I could absolutely do that now. Sure, downtown Bryan is a bit more quaint than seaside California, but the experience would be relatively the same. This schism, between daydream Delaney and real Delaney left me questioning what I actually want out of life, rather than what I just think I want.

Moving to Seattle or Long Beach is attainable, but becoming a completely different person in those cities is not. All of the narratives I was raised on suggest that cutting my hair, changing my style, or moving to “the big city” are magical ways to fix my unhappiness, but the more I think about it it seems that the only way to be truly happy is not to wish to be another person in another place, but instead to learn to love who I really am and plan for the future that I could truly enjoy. What would an introverted, anxious, moderate income level life look like in these cities? What pieces of my daydream can be made into a reality, and which do I need to leave simply to my traveling mindscape?

If I re-evaluate my daydreams through the frame of reality, I see that what I want is actually not that much different from what I have. I want a place to be active, to walk or swim. I want somewhere to go where I feel safe and known. I want a job that gives me some flexibility and does not steal up all of my freetime. I want a partner to wake up next to and a family to call my own. I don’t have all of these things yet, but I am working on them. Some of these are attainable goals that I can reach now and some are things that I can have one day regardless of if I end up in Seattle, Long Beach, or elsewhere.

Daydreams are incredibly powerful tools for thinking about life as one wishes it could be. However, when making the shift from daydreaming to planning, it is important to let reality back in just a little bit. Being happy with who I am is my new prerequisite for planning my future life. And with that figured out, both my unrealistic daydreams and my workable plans have become brighter and more interesting as a result.