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Why Dreamers Will Always Have Enemies (& Why They Will Always Never Matter)
In this post, our blogger explores why dreamers will always have enemies and explains why they will never matter.
Why Dreamers Will Always Have Enemies
High school teachers, I firmly believe, have one goal. To destroy your creativity.
OK, that’s not fair. I had some wonderful English teachers – who encouraged and praised me – but most were just there to try and break your spirit. I had a French teacher who wrote to my parents that I had a ‘lackadaisical attitude’ to school and homework. (I remember thinking ‘lackadaisical’ was a good word.)
Another teacher told me I had a ‘wild sense of grammar’. I mistakenly took it as a compliment.
I told my guidance counsellor I wanted to be an author. ‘You’re not Wilbur Smith,’ she sniffed. ‘Get your head out of the clouds and study to be a teacher.’ In those days, guidance counsellors wanted you to become a school teacher – I suspect they were paid commission.
There were even people closer to me, at home, who also wanted to get my head out of the clouds. One afternoon, after a horrible fight with my Dad, he tore up a chapter of a novel I was busy writing. ‘Stop writing this crap,’ he screamed, ‘and study!’ I wasn’t that upset – mostly because I’d made three copies of that chapter because I thought it was brilliant. (It wasn’t.)
The truth is I liked having my head in the clouds. That’s where the stories lived and I wanted to get to them. There was always a voice inside me that told me to keep going – sometimes a ragged whisper, sometimes a loud confident boom.
That’s the only voice we should all listen to.
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Posted on: 23rd February 2017
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3 thoughts on “Why Dreamers Will Always Have Enemies (& Why They Will Always Never Matter)”
Awesome article.It happens almost all the times.Some of writers are scorned and jeered at simply because society finds their passion for weaving words into stories senseless or dumb.Society even perceive writing a waste of time.
Funny and sad because it’s true! We must have had some of the same teachers. Sadly the ones who wanted to destroy my creativity and break my spirit started in grade school as well. They just got more persistent as I got older. I am actually an artist. I sub to writing posts because I write comic scripts so I have something to draw about. I started making comics in grade school as a way to gain acceptance with my peers. I have struggled mightily with the notion that art and creativity were wastes of time due to the input of negative and unsupportive people in my life poo pooing on my passions. I just keep doing what I do in spite of it all. Art is something I live and breath and love and yes, sometimes hate. But it is above all something I am compelled to do because it is what I am. People just have to accept that.
Thank God, Anthony, you didn’t listen and kept your head in the clouds!
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