extraordinary dreams

This is a hard one to write. I told myself that in this post, I would open up more about myself than quote the Rats or use my friends' life dilemmas to make a few people laugh. It's the last post of the decade, and I want to end on something more personal.
Ten years ago like now, I was in Jordan with my entire family, welcoming the new decade in the Wadi Rum desert, near a bonfire and under a sky full of shooting stars. There was so much love and laughter that day that I thought we were going to have a really wonderful year, or ten. And let's just say it wasn't quite what I expected. Three divorces, five cancers, four deaths.
Now before came the doomed decade, I was the unstoppable kind: I thought of myself as the best writer at age 13, and wrote a book to prove it. I thought I was going to be one of the greatest actors of our times, and had started acting in plays, always as a leading character of course. There was nothing humble about me or my dreams, and I believed in them more than anything. I miss that about me. Because once reality started crashing in, I stopped dreaming. I was sixteen but thought of myself as an adult. I thought "now that I understand life (imagine the audacity) I have to prepare myself. No more silly dreams about winning oscars and making the best-seller lists. Let's go to AUB, do some practical degree about something I couldn't care less about, and lower our expectations." Wow. Really amazing philosophy of life I got there.
And every so often, I would wake up in the middle of night in cold sweats, terrified that all I was doing with my life was what everyone else was doing, and that all I was ever going to be is what everyone else was going to be. I was going to be ordinary. And that was the single thing I never  ever wanted to be.
But I was too scared of being disappointed. There are things I couldn't control, like the fact that my mother died before she saw any of her kids grow up. So in what I could control, I would make sure there would be no disappointment factor. I let all of my dreams go.
The truth is, I made a huge mistake. I thought I could manage my disappointments by lowering my expectations and that turned out to be the biggest disappointment of all. And it wasn't the lesson I was supposed to learn. Here's what I know now: Life is short. And it can take months of fighting a disease or a split second to take you away, and no one knows when.
In the last decade, I lost my faith in God and I said a prayer at the Vatican; I broke a heart, and I dated a guy who turned out to be gay; I lived in my very own apartment in New York City and somehow I'm right back where I started: sharing a bedroom with my younger sister and fighting with her about wearing my new shoes.
Now comes the next decade... And there won't be any shooting stars to make a wish to, but I want to dream again. And I don't know yet what those dreams are going to be, but the possibility of doing something extraordinary is enough.