I need to stop dreaming. Dreams are all well and good when you're young, ambitious and believe that anything is possible. But everyone reaches an age where it's time to stop dreaming about "what you want to be when you grow up". I have grown up - Shit, I'm almost 25 - and it's high time I realised that I am nothing special. I'll not wake up one morning and have a part in a blockbuster movie, I'll not jump up and down on any given Saturday, the winning lottery numbers grasped firmly in my sweaty palm, and I'll never be the almighty conquering hero that saves the day.

It's time to wake up and smell the coffee. I am what I am. Nothing more, perhaps a little less. I, like the overwhelming majority of humanity, am just a statistic, someone who makes up the numbers. My life is to consist of office monotomy and fiscal pressure. Make the ends meet, and if you're lucky reward yourself with a holiday. The best I can hope for is to find some inventive ways to get my pulse racing. It's disappointing to feel that I can't be anything I want to be, but I have to either accept this, and play as well as I can with the cards I have been dealt, or forever suffer the disappointment of falling short of dreams which are to me the carrot hung before the proverbial donkey.

Can I live like this? Knowing that I will never amount to anything special? No fame, no fortune, no chivalrous or magnanimous deeds to pass onto my children's children's children. If I had asked myself that a year ago, I would have looked down at my feet, and slowly swayed my head from side to side while desperately holding back the tears. Now? Well, I don't want to sound trite and clich� by offering that I'm strong enough to make it now, but certainly I know enough to realise that there may be no great meaning in life. No all consuming purpose for which I exist. I know enough to claim that pursuit of dreams is exactly that, and while the elite few may, by fortune or fortitude, realise their dreams, the rest of us are doomed to feel the bitter taste of disappointment. But that's OK. If you don't build yourself up, you have shorter to fall.

I can live because I don't expect to someday become something I do not deserve, and hence can be content with what I am.

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