I was driving home from a job the other night, and my brain was swirling with thoughts. I was on a high from my performance; I was hired to sing for 30 minutes at a private birthday party event. The crowd was electrifying and I had so much fun, I forgot I was working. I started thinking about how much I love to sing and perform and how lucky I am that I get to make a living doing it, but how different my reality is from my dream.
My dream is to make a living performing my original music. I still daydream about performing to a sold out crowd at The Beacon Theatre with a kick ass band, and thousands of people cheering, clapping and singing along to the songs that I wrote. I grew up watching artists like *NSYNC and Billy Joel do just that, but I know that times have since changed. It's a numbers game now, and if I'm too busy focusing on branding myself and "getting my numbers up," then I will be too busy to focus on what I really love, writing music and performing.
Creators have to have side hustles, whatever that may be, to make sure that they don't put pressure on their art to make money, but our art being our way of making a living is every creator's dream. Yet we trek on, overworking ourselves, finding inspiration in inconvenient moments, and sharing our work with the world in hopes that someone somewhere will see it and enjoy it. We will always follow our dreams. But as I was driving I had this thought: do people follow their dreams or do they chase them? There is a difference.
When we follow our dreams, we walk the path that will lead us there. Depending on the type of dream we have, we may be walking for months, or years until we reach it. Sometimes we may never reach it at all. For artists, art is subjective, so the path is not always clear, whereas if you want to become, say a Teacher, you have directions. Sometimes there's multiple paths, and we have to choose one to follow. Sometimes the path we choose leads us to becoming a music teacher instead. Sometimes it leads us to starting our own wedding band. Sometimes you may realize that you don't want to have a career in music at all. It's all part of the journey.
How do you know you're not chasing your dream? To chase is to catch or catch up with something. You will do anything you can to catch it; throw obstacles in front of it to trip it up, attract attention to it to slow it down, make out-of-character decisions, etc. A good example of this is when people want to "go viral." They will make any and all content, whether it is relative to their page or not, to try to attract the attention of millions of people, all for millions of views, which may lead to virality and fame. The videos are usually cringey and hard to watch.
Another example is when I was just starting out as an artist. I didn't know who I was as a songwriter or an artist, but I was chasing my dreams. I was singing dirty songs I didn't write or connect with, I was taking photos showing a lot of skin, I was belting every other note because I could and I thought it would impress listeners. I was desperate. These were all the things I thought people wanted to see and hear in order to consider me as an artist for a record deal, and these were none of the things I would later learn represented Cristina F the songwriter and performer. I was chasing my dreams by trying to catch up with what every other artist was doing. I was following the people, not the path.
When I released my first EP and shared with the world that I was a singer & songwriter, everyone told me I needed to get on American Idol and The Voice. Chase your dreams. People told me if I wanted to get seen on Youtube, my singing had to be 100% flawless in every video. Chase your dreams. "You're so talented but you're never going to make it because you don't have a gimmick." Chase your dreams. "You have to get on Tik Tok everyone is getting signed." Chase your dreams. All this did for me was help me realize that nobody would think I made it unless I was famous!
But I did make it, and I continue to make it every single day. I get to sing and perform for a living. I make money performing my original music. My Christmas song has been played on the radio with 0 payola. As a kid, I always dreamed that following my dreams was making it big and being on the big stage, but as I have gotten older I realized, maybe "making it big" meant running a successful entertainment company, or starting an educational children's music class. I am still on this musical path, and it will always be unpredictable, but I have grown so much and learned so much on this journey. I still have my dreams and I follow them everyday. I hope that if you are reading this, you are too.
"You can't stop the fear. If you're running around chasing everyone else then you won't see the clear. You're running long, running on"
-Cristina F "The Fear"
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