Daph's latest post is the most depressing thing I've read in a long time. The greatest tragedy of life IS growing up. And we're growing up. There're so many of us who are already cynical and unromantic and unbelieving. I have wild, romantic dreams. They may be unrealistic even by the standards of my counterparts who themselves are dreamers, and I'm aware of it, but I still don't ever want to give up my dreams. I don't want my life to turn out completely different from what I imagined. The thought is devastating.

Daph says, "i can long for poetic misery but i probably can't deal with the reality of it." I'm quite the opposite, really. I need my material luxuries. That much is obvious. And I long for poetic romance. I don't know if I can deal with the reality that there really are no grand love stories. I don't know if there really aren't any grand love stories, I've just been told that there aren't and that I should stop believing in them. But again, I don't want to. Because that means giving up on love and I don't think I could possibly do that. I think I'll keep hanging on to that perhaps naive optimism until and unless the day comes that I lose the spirit and give in to mundane existence, settling, compromise or whatever it is. Hopefully by then I'll be in the sort of oblivion that many adults live in now. Living whatever sort of life, being perhaps vaguely unhappy or unfulfilled but not really pinpointing any reason or trying to change anything. If at all they realise that there IS something missing.

Chit said something a long time ago that i still remember and i hope i keep remembering it: don't ever forget what it's like to be a kid. I mean, here we are, thinking that we've realised that we don't want to lose what we are and therefore we aren't going to lose what we are now, as children, as optimists perhaps. But who knows that our parents weren't like that?
I don't want to grow up, if growing up means losing my dreams and settling for someone else's dreams, if it means living vicariously through my children or my husband or the woman in the soap. Because I'm a kid today, and I can see that my mother is living through me in a way because she wants me to become what she never did. What if I neither live up to her dreams nor mine? My mother's life isn't what my grandmother dreamed for her. I know that. And in some strange way I think what my grandmother wants for me is closer to what I want than what my mother wants for me. That's another story, but my grandmother is an interesting person. Not because of what she says or does, but because of what her actions reveal. She's got a lot of regret.

She and my mother both had the postgraduate degrees, but they never really worked in any job that was deserving of her qualifications. My grandmother never worked at all but in her own kitchen. She calls that her job, cooking for her husband and children and grandchildren. My mother's dad told her to get married at 24 and she did and the next year she was pregnant and the rest is history. And she still listens to whatever her father and her husband tell her, and she can't make a decision without their input and hours of vacillation over what shall i do i don't know what to do.

I don't want to turn into my mother. I think that is my worst fear. I don't want to grow up and become all practical and shit and become jaded about life, and lose all my dreams and my expectations. OK I think I'm going around in circles here. Hell. I just need to be idealistic about idealism, I guess. Doesn't matter if it's stupid, I'd rather be stupid than jaded. Jaded, cynical, grownup is the worst thing to be. Tragic. I have to believe that idealism has a fighting spirit. That dreams will only die screaming. Thinking too much about the likelihood of the future being a faded, remote heaven will only drive me crazy.