It’s 3 a.m. again. I wake up from my dream. It’s one of those dreams that you experience very intensely. It starts like this: I want to apply to film school, somewhere in an important city in the U.S. I arrive alone. I stay in a room with two young girls who are already studying at this university. They are great, fun and creative. We hit it off right away. They tell me that I will definitely get in. I want to apply for editing,
I’m at the interview now, and turns out that they committee is making me do an acting improvisation. And I’m terribly stressed, because I’m not into acting or improvisation at all. I try something, then something esle, but I know it’s terrible. I’m stiff, stressed, it’s not my thing at all. It’s one of those feelings you get when you’re standing naked in front of an audience. I feel ashamed and humiliated. Nothing works.
There are two professors at the recruitment, both important and well-known in the film world. They add another person/student to keep me company and play with me. A young guy. He’s great, he’s much better at everything. I try to match him and I’m doing a little better, but I can see and know that he’s better. Finally, we sit down in front of the professors and there’s a conversation.
One of them suddenly reminds me of my sociology professor from almost 20 years ago – Aleksander Manterys. He was a guru of classical sociological theory. The kind of professor who commanded respect and made everyone tremble during his oral exams. And now I’m sitting in front of him, completely unprepared, and I have to show myself in the best possible light. He asks me about my name.
Suddenly, everything revolves around my name, which no one can pronounce. There is interest. What am I doing here? Why here? After a while, it somehow turns out that the whole exam is taking place in a park in the open air. A car pulls up and the two girls I stayed with get out. They create a great atmosphere, joking with the professors, who are surprised that we all know each other. Their expressions immediately soften, and the atmosphere becomes friendly. Suddenly, it’s about something else, about relationships, jokes, testing whether we will like each other. And it turns out that we do.
3:30 a.m. I wake up from my dream. I don’t know how it ended. I don’t know if I got in. But that’s not even the point. I wake up not with fear and shame, but with a completely different feeling. With the feeling that I have a mission and a plan again. That I want to do something again and I can start something completely new. That in order to start something, I don’t need to know everything about it right away, or not even where it will lead me. I’m riding a wave of energy that pulls me into the new and unknown.
And I wake up with the feeling that I know what my strength in life is. It’s relationships and people. People who carry me, their energy. Relationships are my greatest weapon and strength. I always put them first. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t, but I know it’s worth it. Because people give me the strength to act. I wake up and I know that I am this little person in a big country that I don’t quite feel, that is still foreign to me, that still doesn’t want to give me my full wings, that still holds me back from the opportunity to work, that gives and takes away, but which is my home. A country where no one can pronounce my name, but which nevertheless gives me the feeling that I can go further and reach for more.
I wake up from a dream in which a part of me that has been dormant for a long time suddenly gets wings and eagerly awaits new things. With fear under my arm, but I’m going for it because I’m very curious to see how this wave will unfold.
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