Be Delusional About Your Life.
A week ago, a friend and I were sitting in a café that was almost entirely empty. The weather was cool, the sky was a bit cloudy and we had been talking for a while. Then the conversation landed on dreams. On the things we actually want.
My friend laughed a little, in the way people do when they've already decided something is embarrassing. "That sounds delusional, right?"
“Delusional” —people use this word like a verdict. Like if you want something badly enough to believe it might actually happen, you've lost touch with reality. Society insists you should want things reasonably. Keep one foot out. Don't get ahead of yourself. You'll be less hurt if it doesn't work out.
What nobody talks about is what that costs. Being “realistic” has a price. You talked yourself out of opportunities before anyone else even gets the chance to. You never tried because you got there first and told yourself it was too much. You did not send that email. You laughed off your dream. Because what? You didn't want to be viewed as being “delusional.”
We are just three months into this year and a lot of things have happened. I got published in a magazine in New York—they are currently hosting a launch in Australia. They'll move to LA soon.
The magazine. See my name?
I found a second remote writing job through Substack. I watched this newsletter grow past points that used to feel hypothetical to me, like numbers I would say to myself as aspirations without fully believing they meant anything. I started getting work inquires for things I hadn't thought to offer.
Someone reached out about a project that was so far outside what I'd ever imagined that my first instinct was to assume they had the wrong person. They didn't. That keeps happening, in different forms — the world moving toward something I had imagined before I had any evidence it was possible.
None of that happened because I was being realistic.
It happened because some part of me just kept operating under the assumption that this would work out. I have a bone-deep, almost irrational certainty that my life is supposed to go the way I want it to go. That the destination is fixed, even if the route changes.
But oh God, do I get doubtful. Sometimes I think, “what if this doesn't work? What if you've misread yourself? What if the people who are being realistic are being realistic for a reason and you're just too far in to see it?”
I get that voice in my head regularly. Some days it's louder than others and on those days I don't have a perfect answer for it.
But I also think “what if I'm not wrong? What if the step that looks delusional from the outside is just the step that hasn't been explained yet? What if the only thing separating where I am from where I'm going is time, stubbornness, and refusing to talk myself out of it before anything has even had a chance to happen?”
Those two questions live in me at the same time. The doubt and the delusion, side by side.
We pre-emptively decide something is too much. It starts first with the self-deprecating laugh, the quick dismissal, the way my friend said “that sounds delusional, right?” before the sentence was even finished. Like if you say it's foolish first, it can't be taken from you. Like the embarrassment is better managed if you're the one administering it.
Being realistic is often just a more socially acceptable way of giving up on things that matter. It sounds responsible. Like yes, it's the right thing to do. But really, you're just scared.
My life may not follow the route in my head, but the end result will be the same as the one in my head.
My friend and I moved on from the conversation. The coffee cooled, someone else came in, we talked about something else. But I've thought about that laugh more than once since then. The quick, reflexive way it arrived. The way wanting something fully is the thing that makes people nervous.
Delusional is what they call it when you believe in something before you have proof. Turns out that's just the order it goes in. That's just how life is.
Most of the things we are enjoying in this modern era were birthed by delusional people ,do you know how the public reacted when they heard that the wright brothers wanted to build a plane but look at us now enjoying the fruit of that delusion .
Delulu is the solulu😇.