whose dreams are these, anyway?

touring is hard, touring with your twin is even harder

Mar 01, 2024

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my biggest dreams and the role they play in my life. I’ve been revisiting past aspirations, coming up with new ones, and pondering how any of these fantasies would actually serve me if they were to come true.

Without a doubt, the dream I’ve held the longest lives in music. Before I ever picked up an instrument or wrote a song, I dreamt of being some sort of successful performer, preferably of the pop variety. I genuinely credit Hannah Montana for this.

I remember being nine years old, begging my mom for a Hannah Montana costume for what felt like a year straight. I believed a blonde wig and a fake mic were the key to unlocking everything. As I got older, thankfully, my dreams grew up too. Popstar was out of the question, but folk singer? I was all in, baby.

My sister and I formed our little country folk band in our freshman year of high school. We had our sights set high – dreaming of the day we’d play a big stage at Woodyfest, Okahoma’s premiere folk festival, or headline the Blue Door listening room in Oklahoma City.

When one of our favorite artists asked us to open for her at the Blue Door, we really felt like we’d hit the big time. All our dreams were coming true! But with every goal we reached, more goals were set.

We wanted to play out of state. We wanted to record an album. We wanted to be recognized by our peers as cool (wildly unrealistic). We wanted and wanted and wanted! And we gave those wants our all for the entirety of our late adolescence and young adulthood.

Before I knew it, I was 24 years old, going on a national tour opening for Tori Amos to sold-out rooms of thousands. I couldn’t have fathomed this reality at 17, when playing the Blue Door felt like the biggest thing I’d ever do.

At the end of the two-month-long tour, my sister and I looked around at all we’d done, and still. We wanted.

Don’t get me wrong – there were many moments on those stages where I looked into as many eyes as possible and felt so aware of all that had led me to be in this room, sharing my songs with so many kind strangers.

In those moments, I felt lucky. I felt like teenage me was getting everything she’d ever hoped for and more.

And still.

My sister and I fought each other tooth and nail through the tour, spending every hour of every day together, whether in my Mazda chasing after the tour bus, cooped up in the green rooms, playing on stage, or sleeping back-to-back in a motel bed. It is my deepest belief that identical twins should not legally be allowed to be in each other’s presence for more than six hours at a time.

Despite all the ups and downs and hardships of tour and twinship, we were still achieving our oldest dreams. Shouldn’t we feel fulfilled? Isn’t this what we wanted?

By the time we rolled back into our town, we knew something had to give, and that our career in music together was the thing that had to go. We had to ask ourselves:

Whose dreams are these, anyway?

Why were we suffering in pursuit of what we wanted as fifteen-year-olds when our present-day selves were literally begging for anything else?

Nearly two years after laying our band to rest, I still sit with the grief of letting it go. I still have days where I imagine what could have been. And my sister and I still fight, believe it or not! But our relationship is intact, and healing with every day we don’t have a black pit of stress and responsibility between us.

I believe if we had continued down the road of full-time touring together, we may have reached a point of no return. No dream is worth losing your sanity over, and there is certainly no dream worth losing your sister.

I’ll never stop playing music, and I’ll never stop hoping somebody listens, but I’ll never pursue a dream at the cost of joy. Folks, I know it sounds trite, but happiness is a lot of just learning to want what you already have.

To this day, I’m rebuilding my dreams from the inside out. I’m trying to differentiate between what my ego tells me I should want and what I actually want.

So, as we enter into yet another spring and watch the world evolve around us, it’s as good a time as any to reevaluate what we hold dear.

May we continue to ask ourselves, "Whose dream is this?", and may we listen when the answer is beyond us.