by Margareta Astaman
[box]Spark asked Margareta about dreams and the role they play in one’s life, and the result – an interesting take on how dreams help you reach your own happy endings in life. Read on to know more.[/box] [box type=”bio”]Margareta Astaman is a rising young Indonesian author. Through her popular lifestyle blog, Have a Sip of Margarita (http://margaritta.multiply.com), Margareta has been raising awareness of social issues such as relationships, self-identity and the balance between races and the genders in urban communities in Indonesia. She has published two books in Bahasa Indonesia and is also a guest blogger for Kompasiana, Indonesia’s main online newspaper, and a blog mentor for select Indonesian university students, teaching them writing and blogging. [/box]Have you ever really wanted something? Wanted it so badly that day and night, all your dreams are just about that? Do you dream about it so often that imagination and reality collide? This phrase was my question to a friend of mine, and the first line of my second book. It was three days before Valentine’s Day, when my friend decided not to pursue a ‘happy ending’ for his own love story. The two had been dating for years but decided to give up despite still caring for each other very much. I told him if he didn’t fight for something, he simply didn’t want it bad enough. He replied that in real life, people didn’t always get what they wanted. I insisted otherwise. So I wrote a short story on him, just to show how his story could have been written in another way—if he had wanted it. And what initially was a short story to prove that a happy ending could exist, turned out to be proof for myself that a cherished dream does come true.
I am no ‘chicklit’ writer. With my short hair and my boyish looks, I am not really girly . Nor have I been fond of fairy tales. I never believed that life could be that simple. And I didn’t believe that happy endings featured in my life. Dreams were only for kids, I used to think, because, I reasoned, ‘when we grow up, dreams don’t come true’. But after that Valentine’s Day, when I sat in front of my laptop, and began typing the story, I started to wonder if there can be no happy ending at all. Or…just like in the story I wrote, can there be a happy ending, at least for the main character, but in real life, people just never think that they played the main role in their own lives? Was that why they didn’t expect a happy ending for themselves? I kept staring at my draft. It wasn’t derived from pure imagination. It was the story of a real friend, with a real potential of a nice ending. But my friend, the main character, didn’t really own the story. He didn’t think that he should fight for what he wanted. He didn’t even care about how his dream ended.
It was I, an outsider to the story, who insisted on creating a storyline that enabled him to make his dream come true. In my story, despite all the problems that existed, the two finally found their way to be back together, when in reality they split. While I was writing a happy ending for their story, I didn’t even care about my own life story and dream. At that moment, I realised that my friend and I had one issue: we didn’t think specially of ourselves. We assumed we were just one of a million human beings in this whole wide world. As just a little part of this million, we didn’t dare to think of ourselves as the main character – of our own story. There had to be someone else with a more important role than us. There had to be someone else who deserved to have their dreams come true, more than ourselves. And, as for us, we were just the supporting actors, sitting at the side of the world’s scene, watching others’ drama. It was good enough if anyone ever remembered that we existed. Our own life was owned by someone else. The main role was taken by someone else. We were only left with the role of the audience, busy commenting on others’ lives as if we were watching a movie.
Have I really chased my childhood dream? I used to dream of being a story teller, astonished by The Famous Five series from Enid Blyton. Before I could write, I would lie down and tell myself a story. I would not stop before I finished it. After I learnt how to write, I wrote those stories, gave some illustrations and insisted on selling them to my grandmother. This way, I got my story published. The little girl dreamt of weaving stories that would inspire other little girls. She dreamt of creating dreams around her, making fantasies alive. She wanted to exist in the heart of those little girls long after she was gone, through her words. But the little girl grew up. As a grown up, I began to thinking logically and realistically. I began differentiating between what was possible and what was not. And so, I told the little girl that being a writer could not be a future plan; that there was no artistic talent running in the blood of my family; that writing was not enough to make a living. And that it took luck to get a book published. And so on. And saying thus, I nearly killed the little girl in me; I nearly fell into the trap of not dreaming. And when I realized what I was doing to myself, I wondered if there was anyone outside there, currently writing a story of me and deciding how great my life should end.
It struck me that I could decide on my own happy ending, I could reach my dream, if I really wanted it, if I really saw myself as the main character in my own life, who fought for her dreams, and who believed in achieving it. That’s when I decided that I didn’t want someone else to write my own life. I wanted to wake up the little girl so that I could dream again and be the author of my own story. If I could tell my friend that he had to chase what he wants, I had to be a real storyteller too. I had to insist on getting into a Journalism course despite failing the English test. I had to apply to be the Country Editor of MSN at the age of 22. I had to keep writing in my blog without expecting anything. I had to insist on chasing what I had always wanted to do. A year after I posted that short story on my friend on my blog, I launched my first book. Without my knowing, local celebrities and internet practitioners had followed my blog and given positive reviews. A publisher decided to turn my blog into a book, titled Have a sip of Margarita. Months after that, another publisher saw my short story, and an extended version of it was published as a book too, titled Cruise on You. I can’t say that I’ve made all my dreams come true. I’ve still got a long way to go. But I’m glad I’ve tried to write my own life story, and inserted little happy-endings along the way. Among all of those is that I dared to challenge my friend again whenever he lost spirit in fighting for things he had always wanted. Because if you want something so badly, you’ll go for it – no matter how simple your dream is or how ridiculous the path you have to go through. You’ll do anything to make it real. And eventually, you’ll get it. It’s your life, after all…
Pic : Mike Pedroncelli – http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikepedroncelli/
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