Dreams

So, when I was a little boy, I wanted to be an astronaut. 

It's actually more accurate to say I wanted to be a starfighter pilot. Look — I grew up on Star Wars and Top Gun, and of the two, the galaxy far, far away seemed less rife with sexual tension, which is appealing to a Catholic 8-year-old boy. And all spaceships, by an amateur analysis, utilized my three favorite things: lasers, explosions, and robotics. I was irrevocably hooked. 

That's me in the bottom right, around the age I became obsessed with space. No, I do not

know what I was looking at when this what shot. It's clearly gross.

Still am, truth told. Time has never worn down that stone. What did change, however, was my understanding of what being an astronaut actually required. Turns out that roguish charm, courage under fire, and shaggy hair represented approximately six percent of the ideal astronaut resume. The remaining 94 percent was primarily math-based. Astrophysics, trigonometry, long division. You know. The tricky stuff.

This was discouraging, as I was already a notably poor math student and well on my way to remedial courses as a high school freshman. I could read and write well enough, but when something needed numbers, I was alphabet soup — missing all the key ingredients. At some point around age 15, with this self-awareness in full bloom, I felt the dream start to die on the vine. You're never going to be an astronaut, Brain Travis said, unless NASA is adding stenographers to crews. Heart Travis listened. 

By 16, I was pumping out so much copy for the school paper that I really didn't have time for visiting hours when my childhood dream went on life support. Starvation, the doctors said. I wasn't feeding the passion, and it was wasting away. Predictably, at some point during my sophomore year, my astronaut dream flatlined. There was no funeral. Just a pine box and a hole.

And there it lay for a long time, buried in a shallow and fallow grave in the back of my mind, alongside the other myriad failures of youth — Here Lies Poor Grades, In Loving Memory-Past Romance, RIP: Missed Opportunities. I think we all carry those little cemeteries around with us, holding our breath as we hurry by them in hopes that we don't somehow resurrect the vulnerabilities we banished there. I tread more cautiously than most. This is surely why I hate zombie films. 

But we millennials — or at least the subset of the millennials that are just now hitting their early 30s, like I am — are almost genetically predisposed to mental necromancy. We've lived just long enough to have a "history", a past that both empowers and encumbers us. It's forged through youthful trial-and-error. On the other hand, we've likely got decades of wondering and wandering ahead of us, and have yet to solve the vexing riddle of fulfilling interior and exterior expectations.

Put another way, we're still not exactly sure what we want to do with ourselves, but we've finally got a pretty good idea what we can't. 

American society has devised countless play-on-word generalities for those of us embarking on our fourth decade of duty — Dirty 30s, amiright?! — but, to me, we're the true 'tweeners. We're too old to be young and dumb, and too young to be old and wise, so we sit bitch, uncomfortably mashed between the sharp elbows of our precocious youngers and the man-spread knees of our respected elders. It's sweaty and stuffy and we're not sure the seat belt works. 

It's not really an identity crisis — it's actually the frigid, forgotten void between one and the next. The late German-American psychologist Erik Erikson, who actually invented the term "identity crisis", broke down personal progression into eight stages that cover the human lifespan from bumper to bumper. They're all fascinating, but I'm particularly focused on two: Intimacy vs. Isolation, and Generativity vs. Stagnation. Or, more accurately, the connective tissue that holds those two stages together. 

That first stage, Intimacy vs. Isolation, centers around our ability (or inability) to build lasting, loving relationships and support structures. It ranges, roughly, from age 18 to 35. The next stage, Generativity vs. Stagnation, gives us a sense of fulfillment (or longing) as we live out our life choices, for better or worse. This stage stretches from age 35 to your early 60s. 

That little gap? Right there at age 35, as we transition out of one stage and into the next? That's the chasm I'm talking about, and that is what, inevitably, leads us back to dreams, and to me staring wistfully up at the moon before I close the shutters each night. 

This part of our lives — this crucial 2-to-5 year span that we suddenly find ourselves thrust into — is essentially the five minutes you spend walking the house before you leave for a long road trip. Did you get everything? Do you have clean underwear? Where is your toothbrush? Don't miss your phone charger. Take a good, long look around, because once you set the alarm and walk out the front door, anything you missed in the final sweep has officially become "forgotten". And you have to live with that.

You have to live with that. That thought runs through my head, over and over, like a Carly Rae Jepsen lyric — this unwelcome house guest that just won't leave. And it drags me, with my heels dug in and teeth clenched, back to the burial grounds of dreams long past — to a few whims I'd long since forgotten, but mostly to passions I'd never truly been able to.     

This is why I stare at the moon at night. Not because I'm planning my trip there.

But to decide whether or not I can live with leaving it behind.