Our lives have no foreshadowing. We exist in a parable composed in messy handwriting and screenshots.
We have no editor.
No backspace.
We cannot do or be anything we please, and instead wander in the vague direction of our childhood aspirations.
Every parable has a moral — a lesson deemed worthy of our attention.
But what about stories with no foreseeable end? What about our stories — the ones we are literally in right now? What’s the moral of the story we tell ourselves about who we want to be?
If a little girl decides that when she is grown she would like to fly through outer space, does her aspiration orbit around determination or is it that she is drawn to scale and weightlessness? Maybe the weight of the world is already crushing her a little, and she sees a way out. She dreams of an adulthood where she can witness infinity and float within it without being compressed. Maybe she will find it in astrophysics. Or maybe in art or music or architecture.
That child who wore tiaras and decorated her room with DIY canopies? It wasn’t about the dress, nor even the extravagance or privilege. Perhaps she simply wished to be chosen. Perhaps she longed for the certainty that someday the world would look at her and really see her “for the first time in forever” — shoutout, Elsa.
I am captured by the particularity of what young kids want to be when they grow up. It’s a specificity many of us wish we had now, sitting down to plan the rest of our lives all in the span of third period. Not “something creative,” or “something that pays well,” but a firefighter, a veterinarian, Taylor Swift.
Why is it that we are so specific when we are so young — our eyes clear enough to be a metaphor — yet so vague by the ninth grade? How is it that at the age of 6, I was so sure I would be a dirt princess when I grew up, yet, now, I’m not even sure which classes to sign up for next semester?
At 6, “impossible” has yet to dawn on you. Everything you desire is formed from things you’ve seen. For me, I took two things I loved and mashed them into my own invention. Dirt cakes and Elsa’s castle seemed so contrary, it scared me. So I mashed them together into a dirt castle in which I ruled.
My dream was pure because it existed long before the noise. The all encapsulating murmur of the outside world. Guidance counselors, teachers, parents … they can take that clarity from you. It’s not intentional, of course. They’re not trying to talk you out of it, but rather teaching you to think critically until it gets to a point when you talk yourself out of what previously felt true. I became adept at questioning everything in a world often void of answers, living a thousand lives and thinking a thousand things all at once.
Was I flawed when I was so sure? Or am I flawed now? Is the mistake in the questions or in the lack of answers?
But the kids who didn’t become what they said they would most certainly didn’t lose their way or fall short. And the ideas they had to start with were never imperfect. They simply became mistranslated. Tangled in the webs of reality and “growing up.”
It’s the difference between determinedly digging holes to find your proverbial “song,” versus singing while you do it. Instead of locking in on an objective and molding yourself toward it, experiment along the way, mess around and see what else reveals itself. Translating the dreams at age 6 into our goals now takes time, and it most certainly takes longer than third period.
Perchance that girl who yearned for weightlessness is sitting in the dark writing this column. Finding weightlessness in words. A craft as raw as her being, but so much more malleable. A place in which all her words are her own but the ability to rephrase is promised. Perhaps her goal was never to reach the stars, but to dig for them in the ground and mold them to her liking.
Our dreams shape shift, but our hunger is perpetual.