Jaqueline Lockinger / Content and Programming Editorial Co-ordinator / Vevo Europe
I always think that there is more time. More time for me to do this, more time for me to be that. What’s that saying? “You have the same hours a day as Beyoncé.” Maybe I bought into that. But, first of all, I am unfortunately not Beyoncé. Secondly, Beyoncé is living her dreams. She has been living her dream since the tender age of sixteen or even before.
Am I living my dreams? Who did I want to be when I was 16? A dancer, an actress, a chef…
Who did my mum dream of being at 16? According to her, she wanted to be a pilot. And what about her mother before her, where did those dreams go?
“I want you to be a pilot because I couldn’t,” she would tell me. With a heavy heart I burst her bubble. I’ve never wanted to fly a plane. And she said, “Then whatever it is. Whatever you want to be, be that. Do it because I couldn’t!”
I am not the things I dreamt of as a 16-year-old, but I’m something I never could have dreamt of. Working in music was never something I thought I would be doing. Working in the creative industry as a whole, was never something I even knew how to dream about. But here I am. I am here because she couldn’t. And her belief that I could – that I could do anything – is the reason I never gave up on myself.
Well, what about my own dreams that I deferred? There is another dream I had at 16: I wanted to be a writer, and I still want that. It’s easy to think “If only I had time …” But I do have time! I have time to try on multiple hats, to have multiple dreams, and live multiple lives. I wanted to be (and still want to be) a storyteller.
We can inherit our ancestors' trauma. Colonial violence can leave a mark on a person’s genes, which in turn is passed down from generation to generation. If this is true, then those deferred dreams, those unfulfilled aspirations and that untapped potential are passed down too. Their hope lives within us, passed down through our genealogy.
What I mean is dreams aren’t just something you want to be when you are a child - or something that just disappears into thin air when reality hits as you get older. Sometimes we don’t live our exact dreams, but have you ever stopped to think that where you are now, what you are doing today, is something that someone else could only imagine in their wildest dreams?
We bear witness for all of those who are no longer here and as Angela Davis so aptly said when I saw her speak at Southbank Centre in 2017, “Women had this collective dream of a different world, and they acted on that dream.”
The future I want to live, post this lockdown, is one where we can all achieve our dreams – all of us.
