When Dreams are Calling (3 page)

4
A Career: Between Passion
and Chore

Picking
a career, one might say,

Can
be tricky all the way.

But
if others pick for you,

Tell
them straight to do it too!

On your first
birthday in Romania, there is a custom where the elder ones put
different
objects on a table and let you grab any three of them. Then, depending
on your
choice, they make suppositions on what you’ll become in life. I chose
books,
money, and books again. My parents’ verdict was simple: I was to be
either a
lawyer or a doctor. No more and no less. The perfect careers, which
marry books
and money.

“Think about the financial security, the
respect that being a doctor
or a lawyer commands, and the position in the society it offers! Your
life will
be easy and happy,” my parents declared when I had to choose what
university I
would attend.

“I don’t know about that. It doesn’t feel
right.”

“And what do you think it will?”

“I want to be a writer, a gardener, or even a
chef and travel the
world. Nothing would make me happier than that. I want to spend my days
with my
hands in the soil, sing along with the wind and the birds, wish for
rain and
pray for sun, write about the beauty and mystery of life. If I could do
all
that, I think I’ll be happy and proud.”

“Writers die poor, you travel after you already
have enough money to
live forever after, you plant veggies in your retirement, and you won’t
need to
cook once you have the money to go to a restaurant. Take that nonsense
out of your
mind.  You’ll do as you’re told. One day you’ll thank us for
it,” my dad
proclaimed.

“Then, if I must, I’ll be a lawyer!” I replied
furiously.

“Why did you pick law?” my dad asked, curiously.

“Because of the prestige, the charisma that
seems to go with it, the
supposed smartness that accompanies each and every lawyer on their way
to the
court. Because this is what
you
want!”

“Why not a doctor?” my mom jumped in, hoping I
would step into her
shoes.

“Doctors neither let you live free nor die in
peace. They come up
with a long list of must dos and then, you die doing them while others
live ignoring
them. They invent a pill for every ache and pain you suffer from or you
imagine
suffering from. They blame it on stress and forget all the rest. I’ll
be better
off being a bastard egotistic lawyer than a know-it-all doctor.”

“No offense taken,” my mom replied, taken aback
by my sudden
outburst.

“Why should you? I am doing what you want, am I
not? Now, all of you
just leave me alone!” I said rushing out and slamming the door behind
me.

Alone in my room, I was crying. I knew my
parents had a hard time understanding
and accepting my way of being. But what if they were right? What if
being a
lawyer or a doctor was a safe option? It’s the “ifs” that are killing
us. Always
the “ifs.”

While my parents were pushing me towards law,
the entire universe
was trying to keep me away from it. The first sign came when, despite
being the
best in my class, I failed the admission exam and I was not accepted
into the
best law school in the country. It was a miracle, but it was perceived
as a
disaster that would bring shame upon the family for generations and
generations. No one could let this happen, and definitely not my
parents. I was
sent to a private law school where I continued to be an exceptional
student,
which confirmed everyone’s beliefs that I would be a brilliant lawyer,
one that
would make everyone proud. With time, my failure became a thing of the
past and
life followed its normal, easy course.

However, after four years of university, when I
was a step away from
becoming a lawyer, instead of being excited, I was scared and instead
of
feeling liberated, I felt lost.

Although I couldn’t explain why, to me,
practicing law felt terribly
wrong.

“I don’t think I’m cut for being a lawyer, Mom!”

“You’re just a bit scared. It’s perfectly
normal. Once out of
school, you’ll start a new phase in your life. Don’t worry! You’ll be
an
excellent lawyer, perhaps even a famous judge.”

“But what if I won’t?”

“Stop this nonsense! Everyone in our family is
a lawyer, a doctor or
an engineer! Why do you think you’re any different?”

“You make it sound like being different is
something bad.”

“In this case, it is! You’ll be a great lawyer.
I don’t want to hear
about it any longer.”

When she said that, I felt like a puppet. There
was nothing I wanted
more than to break free. But, I was clueless on how I could make this
happen.

Over the time, my panic attacks and anxiety
took over. Frightened
and confused, once again all I wanted was to be a writer, a gardener,
or even a
chef and travel the world.

Dora’s
Journal Notes

• Never be swayed by
  others’
  expectations.
  
• Don’t let pride
  and fear stand between
  you and your dreams.
  
• Choose the content
  over the label.
  Choose the person over the title. Choose the truth over the appearances.
  
• Believing you know
  what is best for
  your kids is like believing the future will be identical to the past.
  
• Feelings are not
  thoughts to be
  explained. Go with them and the explanation will follow.
  
• Let others’
  experiences be your
  compass, but always choose to be the one at the helm.
  
• Being good at
  something does not mean
  you cannot be happier doing something else. You owe it to yourself to
  find what
  that is.
  
• Advice that is
  imposed on others
  becomes a command.
  
• Don’t ask your
  children to be something
  they are not. Instead, teach them how to make the most of who they are.
  

5
Depression: An Opportunity
or a Curse

When
the clouds of a storm are high above

And
we feel lost with no chance to rise off the
ground,

We
might pay a dear price and talk to him

Our
psychiatrist, doctor, who’s happy and slim.

He
might give us a pill to throw us into sleep,

But
when awake we might feel worse than a dead
sheep.

That’s
why you should take my advice and do as I say

Ignore
depression and it will soon fly away!

When I didn’t
want to read any book or go outside, when I just wanted to sleep all
day and
everything seemed to trigger tears, pain, and a sense of loss, when
food had no
flavor and each morning I could feel a cold sweat down my spine, I knew
I was
depressed.

There are many ways in which you can go about a
depression.

Usually, you start by a fairly comprehensive
analysis of its roots.

So, what was it? Was I too sensitive, reading
too much poetry, too
much Freud, too much psychology? Hardly, as I was always excited and
happy with
all of these activities.

Were my sex hormones going cuckoo? Did I need
some
therapeutic sex
sessions
? If that was so, everyone will want to be depressed
and cured,
then cured and depressed and so on.

Was it genetic? This one is always hard to say,
for the simple
reason that some people hide depression so well, that from the outside
they
look better than anyone else around. But, as far as I knew, from my ten
years old
sister to my ninety-five years great grandpa, everyone was in amazingly
good
health.

Could I have blamed it on my parents, on their
rules and high expectations
 that were shutting the gates to my dreams like the guardian
shutting the door
of the prison cell, giving the one inside no option than to wait and
hope? Definitely
too much Freud.

But, like with airplane crashes, it’s never
only one factor; it’s
always a combination. So, go figure.

After the causes are covered and uncovered, you
move on to remedies,
the only thing that truly matters.

Let’s take them one by one: reflexology. I
worked the toes, the
top of my feet, the arch of the feet, the inside and outside of them,
day and
night, hard, then harder, then even harder, following a simple
principle: more
pain outside, less pain inside. But all of my work was to no avail. At
the end
of each session, I had happy feet, but nothing else changed.

Then, I went into astrological aromatherapy,
which tells which
essential oil suits you according to your sun sign. Sensuous,
mysterious,
erotic, uplifting, excellent for nervous tension, sandalwood was ideal
for me,
a true born Aquarius. Maybe the oil was not good, maybe I was not the
run-of-the-mill
Aquarius, whatever it was, it failed. At least I got to smell nice each
day.

Homeopathy was another interesting option. For
mild depression,
anxiety and all those wonderful ailments, aconitum, the queen and the
king of
poisons, was the answer. But only in books. In reality, I was immune to
it.

During all these experiments and thinking and
brooding, I’ve learned
a few things. For example, depression is a controlling, selfish,
manipulating
beast, craving attention. And whenever my attention was waning, her
grip on me
was becoming weaker too. Like any predator, depression was not praying
on the
strongest, but on the weakest.

Then, depression let me get plenty of rest. In
fact, that’s all I
wanted to do and all I did: rest. I rested my body and troubled my mind.

I was also in the position to fully argue that
talk is not cheap.
Quite the contrary, talk can be terribly expensive. And the first visit
to the
psychiatrist proved the point. In fact, it did it so well, that I was
forced to
consider not going back for the second session.

And one last important bit: suddenly I had some
peace and quiet.
People treated me like I’d had some kind of contagious disease and gave
me plenty
of space.

But, besides those small perks, living with
depression, or more
accurately simply existing, was not fun.

I was scared I’d never have a husband, a job, a
family and no one
would ever want me.

I was terrified something was terribly wrong
with me and that I was
different for all the wrong reasons.

Many times 
I wondered why it had to happen
to me, why God, out of all people,
chose to punish me
. Was it a test? If it was, I was failing
it
completely. Was it some kind of sign? If it was, I was not getting it.
Maybe I
had to have patience, to wait. But since when waiting gets us anywhere?

But, I enjoyed lamenting about it. It was the
only thing left for me
to do. And I did it, day after day until my mom, got tired of it:

“So many others would like to be in
your shoes, to be born to such
a family. You should feel blessed for all you have, for being beautiful
and
intelligent and for having the opportunity to become a lawyer. You have
no
reason to feel this way. You’re acting like a spoiled child.”

“Reasons and feelings, why they always have to
go together? You talk
as if I choose to feel this way. But I don’t. If I knew what to do to
feel
better, I would.”

Their know-it-all attitude frustrated me. I
wanted their compassion,
not judgment. I wanted to feel their love, not the burden of guilt for
making
them feel disillusioned with me.

Each day I was hoping to find some miraculous
cure which would make everyone
happy again.  

And one day, I did:

“What if my depression is not a curse, but my
opportunity to change
my life radically? An opportunity to do something that will excite my
tired
mind, will free my enchained spirit, and will give me again the choices
I had
missed,” I asked myself looking in the mirror.

A new chance, A chance to
cut the apron strings,
my inner
voice answered.

“Yes, a chance to master my own destiny and
build a new life,
completely different from what I had and what is planned for me to
have. A life
forged by me, with my own failures and my own achievements, a life in
which I’d
fight for my own dreams. A life worth living. My own adventure.”

And how exactly do you propose to do that?

“There are moments in life when making small
changes it’s not
enough. You cannot build a brand new house on the same shifting soil.”

You need to be a tabula rasa again.

“Or close to it. I need to be far away from my
parents’ pressure,
away from any preconceived ideas about how should I be or what should I
do. I
could go to Canada. When I visited my mom’s cousin in Montreal, I loved
it
there.”

You could give it a try. Plus, she might be
able to help you in
times of need.

“Worse come to worse, I could always come back.”

Worse will become even worse if you’ll come
back.

“Canada will be my adventure. ‘A ship is safe
in harbor, but that’s
not what ships are built for.’ I believe it was William Shedd who said
that.”

So, go with the wind. But, you have no plan.
You barely speak any
English and even if you would, your law degree is not recognized.
You’ve never
done anything in your life, except of reading books. You don’t even
know how to
make two fried eggs.

“I’ll just have to play it by ear. The best
plan is nothing more
than confidence that everything will work out for the best, is it? It
must be a
way. And I will find it.”

Dora’s
Journal Notes

• Depression is not
  a choice, but an
  unwanted and predictable outcome of a series of unhappy choices.
  
• Don’t try to
  explain to others how
  depression feels like; try to learn from them what is to see beyond it.
  
• Accept you are a
  work in progress, that
  there are things which you cannot change, others which take time to
  change and
  some which will be a shame to change.
  
• If you are living
  a dream and you are
  still depressed, check if you are not living someone else’s dream.
  
• Don’t be afraid of
  feeling sad; it
  might be just the push you need for making another attempt at
  happiness.
  
• Life is simple,
  living it is
  complicated.