Opinion
Our young companion had given up on fame. Who was I to argue?
The rain had closed the roads, and we were stranded on the far side of the Flinders in a remote shearers’ quarters cooking outside on an open fire waiting for the wind to dry the country and set us free. Stuck with us on this far-flung station was a young woman, travelling by herself – an independent soul, edgy tattoos, doing yoga in the morning before lone walks to ephemeral waterfalls.
She had a purposefully serene bearing that reminded me of someone who has recently faced down troubles and is minute-by-minute ignoring the pain, deciding to play life like it’s someone else’s problem. Nothing would excite her too much now … she was too distant to be hurt. It was like she’d chosen to be old.
We got talking, and it turned out she had been a musician, and had gained some traction in that world – she was Googleable, I found videos and songs online. But it had ended now, she said. At 17 she’d given herself 10 years to make it and that 10 years was up. It hadn’t worked, so she was putting the dream behind her. “No teenager knows what a decade is,” I said. “You made a bet with an unknown currency.”
I thought of telling her no dream was over until you called it over, but I couldn’t do it. She was right – her dream of living as a musician was likely behind her now. For most people, their belief in their own exceptionality is as comforting as a god on their shoulder – but at some stage, tasting piquant daily truths, the fantasy sickens, loses pace, dies … and they have to live on after its death.
Which makes me wonder about the value of the dream, and of dreaming, of believing you’ll be Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Banksy, Picasso, Hunter Thompson, Cate Blanchett, Anais Nin … of becoming a musician, an artist, an actor, an influencer. Fame has always been a big sell at school, and an easy one to the young, with them wanting the adumbration they see of it. At 15, no one hears the siren song of accountancy or bureaucracy. They eagerly opt to be the next Springsteen, and there is no shortage of adults telling them it’s doable, not far-fetched at all.
But your stories are rejected, your tunes called derivative, you fluff the audition, your art doesn’t sell. It’s a risky thing, the dream, if you’ve invested heavily. Is it wrong for the adult world, the kindly chaperones and trained educators, to enliven the dream, it being so unlikely, so distracting and, eventually, so injurious? Or is the dream a necessary belief for many young people, a crucial bridge spanning that decade from the nihilist teens until the acceptance of the mortgage and the pram?
I think a certain type of kid needs the dream. Some kids are Springsteen for just as long as they need to be, until their imaginations tire and their egos temper to fit the likelihoods, and it no longer hurts not to be Springsteen. What else was going to get those kids through the preposterous disappointments of youth but the dream?
The idea of being a repeat of your parents is way harder to stomach at 17 than at 27, when you’ve made a grudging peace with the everyday. Maybe kids need the dream as a vaccination against despair, until the realisation that this is it, and that your parents weren’t so urgh after all – they were just people who held their heads up and got on with living life by the day, carrying water, chopping wood, after their dreams had died.
There’s life after the dream, I wanted to tell this achingly ex muso. Without the responsibility of being the next Taylor Swift, you’re freed to take pleasure in a picnic, a baby’s foolery, a new bike, love, swimming, making bread, cutting deals … any of the run-of-the-mill labours and micro-splendours that school around us to make a worthwhile world.
We last saw her wandering in a red stone gorge. She’d taken “shrooms” and was entranced by the tumbling water and kaleidoscopic trees, all given licence for high jinks by psilocybin. They say that drug is a powerful tool for self-discovery. I know getting lost is. She’d been lost already that day, she told us, and we thought she probably would be again. She seemed determinedly adrift in the ruins of an imagined life. Next week, once the roads had dried, she’d be back in her city signing on to a happy enough afterlife, I hoped.
Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.
