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Gambling on a Dream

© Regina Sewell

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,

Know when to walk away and know when to run

You never count your money, when your sittin’ at the table

There’ll be tine enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

The Gambler, Kenny Rogers

When I was in the 8th grade, we got a jukebox in the cafeteria of our middle school. We were excited about this because it meant that we would get to listen to pop music at school. Unfortunately, the jukebox didn’t come with many records. “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers, was one of the few, if not the only songs on the jukebox, so we listened to it every day. By the end of the year, the song lyrics were so deeply etched into my brain that they might as well have been tattooed there.

When I was 12, I didn’t understand that “The Gambler” was metaphorical. I thought it was just a silly pop song with catchy lyrics that might server me well should I ever decide to play poker. On the edge of 40, the lyrics of the chorus echo through my head like a mantra as I debate the feasibility of following my dreams.

For years, I have been chasing after some version of the dream of success. I was a good student but couldn’t seem to find any other tangible skills, so when some of my professors encouraged me to go to graduate school, off I went, thinking that academia would be my ticket to success. I reasoned that if I got the right degree and published in the right journals, I would be successful. Unfortunately, at some point, I grew disenchanted with academia. Then I decided that in order to be successful I needed to save the world, or at least some small part of it, so I became an activist. I thought that if I just talked to enough people, wrote enough letters and went to enough protests and made speeches at enough rallies, I could actually cause things to change. It didn’t take too many years to burn myself out. Disillusioned with academia and burned out on activism, I grabbed onto my parents’ version of success in my early thirties. I sought after a full-time job with significant prestige, a list of tangible professional accomplishments, and of course, benefits. This is not where my journey has taken me. As a consequence, I feel like a failure in the eyes of my parents and my society. The irony is that I know that there is no way to ever be successful enough in my father’s eyes. No matter what I do, he always seems to point out what my brother or someone else has done and somehow frame that as “better” or more important. There is no way for me to win by these rules.

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