Living from Fantasy
I was on a call with a friend a few weeks ago and we were talking about blog sites. She started to tell me about a blog site the whole premise of which is to allow people to capture the odd things they hear on the streets of New York. My initial response was something akin to “people actually do that?”
Then she read a recent post, someone had overheard a guy on the street tell a girl that she was much better in bed in his fantasy than she was in reality. Upon hearing this I totally forgot all about the blogging site and immediately wanted to confront this guy and tell him perhaps he had set his experience up to fail. After all, if he had created an expectation, a movie of the events as he thought they should have occurred in order for him to call the experience “better.” Well perhaps that could have put him in that fantasy during the actual event rather than really being present and in the room with the woman he was with.
Not to mention the heart break that I felt for this poor woman who could have been very hurt by this judgement. She may have walked away thinking of herself as not good enough, not pretty enough, not sexy enough….all of those not enough messages that we women can sometimes take in and allow them to shut us down, shut us off and push us away from our very feminine nature that we are meant to thrive in.
Even now, weeks later I think about these two, I think about how they may have missed an opportunity to be truly present with each other, to talk about expectations beforehand, to come at this interaction from an empowered place for both of them. My heart aches for us to be more real and more present in all of our relationships and not let these important opportunities for connection to pass us by.
I have thought about how often I have come at interactions from this place of expectation. How often I have created my own fantasies about life and then sat in my own disappointment when things don’t happen the way my crystal ball of a mind wanted them to.
Over the years as I would travel home on Thursdays each week after being away at work, I would dream about the weekend to come, the things we would do, the deep connecting conversations we would have, how we would reunite and reconnect after the time apart. Of course, I never communicated these desires directly, he should miss me, right? He should want to reconnect right? (a totally unfair approach).
The problem with this approach is that I was not taking my own needs, wants & desires seriously by clearly communicating what I needed. I was living in a fantasy of my own making and when the movie didn’t play out that way, I would feel disappointed, hurt and even unloved.
In how many ways do you not give voice to your own needs, wants & desires? Do you tell yourself stories about the way things could be? Might be? Should be? My challenge to you is to use this information differently. Sure, it is fine to fantasize, heck it is GREAT to fantasize, the trick is you have to share it? A fantasy is a desire you have, and we need to speak our desires even when it is hard to do so. Desires can be anything and everything, we often think of that word only in relationship to sexual desire, but a desire is just another word for wanting, it can represent anything from wanting your beloved to take out the trash each week without being told to wanting your beloved to soak in the bath with you on an intimate date night in. The important thing to realize is that those fantasies have so much more power to make you happy if they are shared and realized in the here and now, so they don’t remain a movie in your head that you wish other people lived up to when you haven’t even provided them the script.
As I continue in my own journey of healing, evaluating how I show up in relationship with others and my own masculine & feminine balancing act, I have been incubating, going slowly and paying attention to what I am being called to birth next. So, I am super excited to tell you about the free interactive event that I am hosting, it is called Meet Your Goddess! Check it out here!
I also have a 12-week class coming up where we will be going deep each week for 12 weeks to continue to build this relationship with our Goddess. You can check that out here.