What Did You Want To Be Before You Grew Up?

The writing I forgot I loved, and the dreams we put in a drawer somewhere...

Teddy snuggled up with me on the sofa ❤️

I’m poorly. 🤒

Seriously you couldn’t make this stuff up.

Almost 6 weeks ago now, I found myself at 2am in a dodgy back street hospital in Cartagena with severe stomach pain, that a week later turned out to be a blocked gallstone and swift gallbladder removal in a hospital in Costa Rica.

And here I am now, in a lovely city just north of San Diego having picked up a chest infection of sorts and feeling very sorry for myself. (Clearly my body is at a bit of a low ebb).

So today I’m doing the thing I almost never do in the daytime. Lying on the sofa with my laptop, blanket on, intravenous drip of tea, Teddy snuggled up on my lap, and Disney movies playing in the background. (They cheer me up!)

Which is how I found myself watching “Hook” this morning.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it, (I highly recommend you do), Hook is the 1991 Steven Spielberg film where a grown-up Peter Pan, played by the brilliant Robin Williams, has forgotten he was ever Peter Pan.

He’s a corporate lawyer now, stressed and distant, too busy for his kids, and deep in the whole sad modern catalogue of being a responsible grown-up.

Then Captain Hook (Dustin Hoffman, in possibly the most enjoyable wig & fake eyebrows in cinema history) kidnaps his children, and Peter is dragged back to Neverland to remember who he actually is.

The cast is extraordinary. Robin Williams, Maggie Smith, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Bob Hoskins (even Phil Collins makes an appearance!). Made even more poignant as three of them are no longer with us. 😢

But watching it this morning in my slightly sensitive state, I found myself thinking about the meaning behind this particular adaptation and wondering:

“What did we dream about as children, before our imaginations got quashed by real life?”

Stop Day Dreaming!

I still remember to this day my teacher’s snapping me back to reality in the classroom with the words ‘Joanne! Stop daydreaming!’

My grandmother used to tell me to stop being such a dreamer.

Even my Mum told me I walked about life with my ‘head in the clouds.’

I once told an old boyfriend that if I ever had children I’d raise them in a hot country, near the beach, travelling the world, and his reaction was to laugh and tell me to come back to reality. (We all know how that dream turned out! 😉)

• “Stop dreaming.”

• “Get your head out of the clouds.”

• “Get back to reality.”

• “You’ve got responsibilities.”

• “There’s life, there’s work, there’s the gas bill, there’s the boss, there’s the mortgage.”

The endless sensible chorus.

You hear it enough times and eventually you realise you’re listening to your own voice .

Using Your Imagination

I’m an emotional soul at the best of times so it was no surprise to find myself shedding tears this morning to two very poignant scenes in the movie.

The first is when the Lost Boys are trying to work out whether this exhausted middle-aged man could really be their Peter.

They’re sceptical. They’ve got a new leader, a young upstart, and he doesn’t believe Peter is Peter at all. The other Lost Boys aren’t sure either.

Then the smallest, cutest one gets Peter to kneel & takes Peter’s face in his hands. He pushes the lines around on his face. The frown, the tiredness, the years of forgetting. He keeps pushing until he reveals Peter’s smile.

And he says, very softly with a huge smile: “Oh, there you are, Peter.”

(Seriously, tear ducts in full motion 😢)

The second is when the Lost Boys sit down to a banquet of imaginary food, miming great forkfuls of nothing into their mouths, while Peter sits there completely confused.

An argument starts & escalates between him & the upstart leader. Peter, mid-rant, picks up a spoonful of nothing and flicks it across the table. Except it isn’t nothing anymore. It’s brightly coloured pretend-food, a great splat of the stuff, and the Lost Boys stop and stare.

“Peter, you’re doing it,” one of them whispers.

“Doing what?” he snaps.

“Using your imagination.”

And the table fills, course after course, every dish the Lost Boys could possibly want, all conjured by a man who’d forgotten he could.

A Writer, An Accountant or a Redcoat!

When I was a child, my mum was convinced I was going to be a writer. And not without reason. I was always writing!

I wrote diaries, journals, stories, plays. I roped my friends into performing the plays in the back garden, fully cast and choreographed, with an audience of bemused parents on plastic chairs.

Every family holiday, I kept daily logs of where we went and what we did. Some of the journals are still in a box in my sisters loft in the UK.

I had a dream of becoming a film director. I specifically revered Steven Spielberg, which is ironic given the film I’m currently watching.

I wanted to make people lose themselves utterly in a story the way he could.

My dad was an entrepreneur, and the one who lit the entrepreneurial fire in me. But by the time I’d sputtered (barely) through my ‘A’ Levels, he wanted me to get a real job.

In an ideal life he wanted me to be an accountant. The fact I was crap at maths had no bearing on his desires.

So I did what any sane daughter would and went off to work as a singer in a caravan park, followed by becoming a redcoat at Bognor Butlins. (If you’re not from the UK just watch an old episode of ‘Hi De Hi’ on YT & you’ll get the general idea 😂 )

Finally when I was about 21, I started my management career at a company that ran concert venues and theatres throughout the UK.

I worked hard, and moved up the ladder quickly, ironically spending most of my days buried under a set of management accounts. Life filled up with responsibility, profit margins, employees, payroll, accounts.

The writing was long gone. For years, I didn’t write a thing. I might have written advertising copy and the occasional internal memo. But the journals, the stories, the plays, the film-director ambition, all of it went into a drawer somewhere and I forgot the drawer existed.

Until I didn’t. Until I started travelling & creating content & chasing my dreams and goals.

The writing has taken a while to catch up as somewhere along the way I lost my voice, but it’s back now and my dreams are still very much alive. Maybe in a different form but they’re most definitely there.

How About You?

• Who or what did you want to be when you were a kid?

• What did you dream about?

• Where did your imagination go when no one was watching?

Do you ever tap into it now, or did you put it in a drawer somewhere too?

The good news is, we no longer need anyone else’s permission to pull the dream back out.

The teacher who told us to stop daydreaming retired thirty years ago. The grandmother who called us a dreamer was just reflecting her own disappointments. The boyfriend who told us to be sensible isn’t in our life anymore for a reason.

We’re in charge of our life now (even if sometimes we forget that!).

If there’s a goal, a dream, an ambition still rattling around in there, (even quietly, half-forgotten, slightly embarrassed at being noticed) it’s ours to take seriously.

Time Won’t Wait

In the movie, as Peter remembers himself as Pan, he remembers visiting Wendy, (played by the wonderful Maggie Smith), who gets older and older every time Peter comes back to see her, until she’s small and silver-haired and almost done.

That’s not a metaphor. That’s life.

Time won’t wait for any of us. The life we’re living now is literally the only one we get.

If we’re not truly living now, then when? What would it take? What needs to happen?

As the story ends, Peter has to go home. The children are waiting. The corporate life is still there. He doesn’t get to stay in Neverland and never grow up, that isn’t the deal.

But he goes home changed. He remembers what he was before life filled up with responsibility, and he carries that knowledge back into his current reality.

And through my tears as the film finished, the late Robin Williams, as grown up Peter, stands looking out to the sky with his family, snow falling & the windows wide open and says:

“To live would be an awfully big adventure.”