At 4am this morning I jolted up in my bed to discover myself having had a bad dream that resulted in rushed breathing and my body covered in a thin layer of sweat. I’m not usually one to have bad dreams so naturally my nerves were a bit shook. If you ask me now I could barely describe a sentence of what occurred in the dream but it spiraled into a very uneasy morning. After not being able to fall back asleep, I lay in bed trying to calm my head as thoughts ran through it at a mile a minute. The thoughts ranged from behaviours to feelings to future uncertainties. It wasn’t long until I realized that I was having a small anxiety attack. These attacks had come and gone much more frequently when I was younger where often I would get stressed and start feeling very anxious.

The main thought that kept reoccurring in my head is the realization that my dreams might be too big for myself. I want to be able to do these big, exciting things in different places around the world but sometimes I wonder if I’m getting ahead of myself and putting unreachable targets at the forefront. It’s not that these dreams aren’t doable, it’s just that they come with many obstacles and require a lot of time/work be put towards them. I’ve always been a big dreamer and have considered it one of my strengths but at times it can be easy for one to mistake it for a hinderance.

The truth is, we all have these moments of self-doubt. The times when we question what we’ve done, what we’re doing and all that we’ve worked to become. It’s natural for myself to be overwhelmed in a time of uncertainity because those are the times in which we are the most critical on ourselves. At a more reasonable morning hour when my breathing became a bit more regular, I began to start understanding that perhaps my dreams aren’t too big but maybe they just require more work and determination that I had thought. I realized that when you want something that bad you’ve got to be willing to put in the work for it, focus yourself on the dream and most importantly, have patience that things will work out.

When I told a friend about my moment of self-doubt she told me that it wasn’t possible to dream too big and shared a quote that she thought would help. Boy, did it ever.

“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”