You Don't Have to Be Able to Dream It

I built a life I couldn't have imagined, mostly because I never knew how to imagine it. Turning 31 today, I think that's the whole point.

I never had a dream.

I know how that sounds, especially from someone who is supposed to be a founder with a vision. But it's true, and today, on my 31st birthday, weeks away from becoming a parent, I finally want to say it out loud. I did not grow up with a big dream. I didn't know what I wanted to be. I had no clue what was even possible for a girl like me. I just kept going.

We don't talk about that version of a life enough. Everywhere you look, someone is telling you to find your passion, name your vision, write the five-year plan, manifest the dream life. The whole industry of becoming yourself assumes you can already see the destination, and that your only job is to want it badly enough. So what are the rest of us supposed to do. The ones who genuinely cannot picture it. The ones who never could.

Here is what I think after living it. You do not have to be able to dream a life in order to build one worth having.

When I was little, I didn't sit around imagining the company I'd run or the person I'd marry or the places I'd see. I couldn't have. Nobody had shown me a life like the one I have now, so I had nothing to picture it with. What I had instead was a quiet, steady willingness to keep moving and to keep saying yes to the next real thing in front of me. Yes to nine months with a backpack after college. Yes to a job in crypto I barely understood at first. Yes to posting one small video of something I'd made. None of those were steps toward a dream. I didn't have a dream. They were just honest yeses, one after another, and they compounded into a life I could never have written down in advance.

That's the part the vision-board version leaves out. A plan can only ever be as big as your imagination, and your imagination is built from what you've already seen. If you grew up without a map for the life you secretly want, your plan will be too small by definition. You'll aim at the biggest thing you can currently picture and call it ambition. But the most extraordinary things that have happened to me are the things I was not capable of dreaming. They were bigger than my own imagination. I only got to them because I kept walking when I couldn't see the end of the road.

So if you are sitting there right now without a clear dream, without a five-year plan, without the faintest idea what you want to be when you grow up, I need you to hear this. You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not less of a visionary than the women who can recite their goals on command. You might just be someone whose life is going to outrun her own imagination, and that is not a problem to fix. That is a gift to protect.

You do not owe anyone a tidy story about where you're headed. You owe yourself the next honest yes. The willingness to go and see more of the world than you've seen, to walk into the room, to make the small thing and put it out there, to keep moving even when you can't picture the destination. That is the engine. The vision is a luxury, and often it's a lie. The momentum is the real thing.

I'm turning 31 today and I still cannot tell you exactly what I'm building toward. I feel a calling I haven't fully answered yet, and I've made my peace with not being able to name it. In a few weeks a whole new person is going to arrive and rearrange everything I think I know, and I can't picture the other side of that either. Good. The best parts of my life have always been the parts I couldn't imagine in advance.

I never had a dream. I have this instead. And honestly, I'd take this over anything I was capable of dreaming.

If no one has told you lately that you're allowed to build a beautiful life without a blueprint, let me be the one.

Sincerely,
Shreya