“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” ~Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
I woke from a dream with the disturbing feeling that something essential was missing.
I couldn’t remember what it was. Only that I needed it. Something necessary had been left behind, misplaced, or forgotten, and without it I couldn’t go forward.
I’ve had dreams like this before. They are unusually intense, and although their circumstances differ, they seem to share the same underlying predicament. Something I need is missing, and I cannot find it.
At first, I thought these dreams might be about forgetting an obligation or failing to attend to something important. But when I began reflecting on the feeling they left behind, I realized it wasn’t anxiety that troubled me most.
It was sadness.
More precisely, it was emptiness. The sense that something essential was absent from my life.
I began asking myself whether I was grieving something I once possessed or searching for something I had never quite found.
Neither answer seemed entirely right.
I wasn’t longing for a particular place or person. I wasn’t searching for a home where I might finally belong.
What I wanted was a state of consciousness.
I wanted to feel creative, productive, helpful, and beautiful.
Beautiful is an unusual word to use in this context, but it feels right to me. I don’t mean physically beautiful. I mean experiencing life as something beautiful—being fully engaged, responsive, generous, curious, and alive.
I have known that feeling.
For much of my life, I worked as a documentary filmmaker, teacher, writer, and musician. I traveled internationally, collaborated with people from different cultures, and found myself in situations where something unexpected might happen.
There was a sense of possibility.
I could begin a project without knowing where it would lead. I could enter a classroom and discover something through my students. I could meet someone whose experience changed how I understood the world.
Life wasn’t always easy, and my work wasn’t always successful, but there was movement. I felt myself participating in something larger than my own private existence.
Now, despite continuing to write and create, much of my life feels empty.
This was difficult to admit because, by conventional standards, I am still productive. I write books and essays. I develop ideas. I pursue teaching opportunities. My curiosity hasn’t disappeared.
But I began to understand that there is a difference between producing creative work and feeling creatively alive.
One can accomplish something meaningful while experiencing very little meaning in the accomplishment itself.
And that distinction troubled me.
Then I recognized something I had not adequately considered.
I have macular degeneration.
My deteriorating eyesight has changed the practical conditions of my life. I can no longer drive. Reading, writing, traveling, and navigating unfamiliar places require adaptation. Activities that once happened spontaneously now require planning, assistance, or compromise.
For someone whose professional life has depended so heavily on observation and visual expression, this has been especially difficult.
Yet I haven’t stopped adapting.
I continue to write. I continue to imagine projects. I continue to pursue opportunities to teach and contribute. My limitations are real, but they haven’t extinguished my creative abilities.
What they have damaged is something less tangible. My confidence that the life I want is still possible.
I had been thinking about my sadness as though something within me had disappeared. Perhaps my creativity had diminished. Perhaps I had lost my purpose. Perhaps aging had gradually emptied life of its excitement.
But that wasn’t quite true.
The desire remained.
What had diminished was my confidence that I could find meaningful ways to express it.
I thought about an opportunity to teach documentary filmmaking in Pakistan. There was also the possibility of teaching in the Philippines.
When I imagined myself working with students, discussing films, helping them discover their own creative voices, I felt an immediate change.
I was excited.
Not mildly interested. Excited in a way I recognized from earlier periods of my life.
I could imagine the conversations, the discoveries, the inevitable surprises. I could imagine being useful again in a way that involved direct human encounter.
For a moment, the emptiness lifted.
That told me something important.
My capacity for enthusiasm hadn’t disappeared. My desire to participate in the world was still alive.
But then another realization followed.
Neither opportunity was certain.
Both depended on approvals and decisions beyond my control. They might happen, or they might not. Even if they happened, the experience might prove less rewarding than I imagined.
So much of my future seemed tentative.
I had possibilities, but not the freedom to turn them into realities.
And perhaps that was part of the sadness.
I was waiting for the world to give me permission to participate in it.
I don’t mean that literally. I know I can write, make music, communicate with others, and continue creating without anyone’s approval.
But I had come to depend on opportunities offered by institutions, invitations, appointments, and circumstances that I could influence but never control.
The work I most wanted to do involved other people. It required an encounter, a response, a relationship.
Writing alone at my desk could be satisfying, but it could not entirely replace the experience of standing in a classroom or collaborating with someone on a film.
I began to understand that what I missed wasn’t simply productivity.
It was reciprocity.
I wanted to offer something of myself and experience the world responding.
I wanted to be needed, not merely occupied.
And I wanted to feel that life still contained possibilities I could not yet imagine.
There is a particular sadness in growing older while retaining the desire to participate fully in life, especially when physical limitations begin to narrow the available paths.
It is not necessarily a wish to return to youth. I don’t particularly want to become the person I was thirty years ago. I want to become the person I can still be. But I want that person to inhabit a life that feels worthwhile.
As I reflected on all this, I returned to the dream.
Something necessary was missing.
I still don’t know what the missing object was, or whether it represented anything at all. Dreams do not come with reliable interpretations, and I hesitate to assign them meanings simply because those meanings fit a story I want to tell.
But the emotion of the dream now seemed familiar.
It resembled the feeling of possessing the desire to move forward without knowing how to proceed.
I could sense the life I wanted, but I couldn’t quite reach it.
And perhaps the most painful part was not the uncertainty itself, but the suspicion that the opportunities I longed for might never arrive.
I don’t have a satisfying resolution to this story.
A trip to Pakistan may happen. A trip to the Philippines may happen. Other opportunities may emerge. I may discover new forms of creative participation that do not depend on travel or institutional approval.
I also know that adaptation is not the same as surrender.
My eyesight has changed. My circumstances have changed. The conditions under which I create and participate in the world must change as well.
But I don’t want to confuse accepting limitations with accepting an empty life.
Nor do I want to make the mistake of believing that meaning exists only in the next invitation, the next journey, or the next accomplishment.
Perhaps the challenge is to find ways of being creatively alive that are available to me now, without abandoning the larger possibilities I still hope to experience.
I am not certain how to do that.
For someone accustomed to solving problems through work, that uncertainty is uncomfortable.
But there is something I know more clearly than I did when I woke from the dream.
I am not searching for a missing object. I am searching for a way to participate in life that allows me to recognize myself again.
Creative. Productive. Helpful. Beautiful.
Not as achievements to display, but as qualities of consciousness to inhabit.
And perhaps the dream has given me something after all.
Not an answer, but a better understanding of the question.
About Tony Collins
Edward “Tony” Collins, EdD, MFA, is a documentary filmmaker, writer, educator, and disability advocate living with progressive vision loss from macular degeneration. His work explores presence, caregiving, resilience, and the quiet power of small moments. He is currently completing books on creative scholarship and collaborative documentary filmmaking and shares personal essays about meaning, hope, and disability on Substack. Connect: substack.com/@iefilm | iefilm.com
