What was your dream when you started out? Did you live to see it realized? Did you forget about it once you grew up?
Adolescence is a time when there’s never a shortage of dreams and aspirations, and when you’re young, the most important thing an adult can do to influence your mind is to encourage you to continue expanding your horizons. It’s when adults crush hopes with their words or actions that early creativity dies, and so I believe it’s actually unbelievably important for parents and teachers to be supportive of the young minds that they have a hand in shaping.
When I was young, my dreams only ever existed in fantasy. In that way, I suppose I truly haven’t changed, because a part of me still wants nothing more than to wake up a character in one of my stories and live an interesting, relaxing life by my own design. I think things would be much easier if I lived my life as if I were living by a script that I created, but alas, I’ve had no such luxury thus far.
It was only when I got older that my dreams changed. In middle school, while I wanted to continue writing stories, my life was full of worries and many types of anxiety kept my mind in chains. Most of the time, I hardly had the time, energy, or patience to carry my goals through the end, and so one of my biggest regrets from that time is being so unreliable towards myself. I remember quite vividly, on the first of January back in 2017, the one goal I made to myself (And the only concrete goal I’ve made for myself since then) was to live to see the end of the decade.
On the first of January, 2020, I spent quite a long time thinking about that wish.
I found myself thinking, was I really in such a bad mental state at that time to have made such a wish? Was there truly such a large question mark on the subject of even my own survival during my eighth grade year? It’s rather early into December now, and as is the subconscious routine for the last month of the year, I ended up thinking back on the past in a new light.
November is a month that holds quite a few anniversaries for me, personally. While I myself am not a part of the statistic, November is the month when I’ve come close to losing many of my friends to suicide – it seems to be someone new each year, sometimes someone tries again the next year. I’ve grown all too used to the routine of sitting on a phone call talking someone down from the edge.
Success rates have varied. It isn’t a thought I relish.
Now that I find myself where I am in my life, though, when I’m old enough and mature enough to think introspectively on certain topics and realize both my own faults and my own strengths as equal numbers, I begin to think rather discreetly of both my past and my future.
I remember times when teachers would ask me what my goals in life were, I remember the confusion on their face when I refused to answer them. With vivid imagery, I can recall times when teachers would try, and fail, to understand the notion I was presenting to them: “I don’t want to make any goals that aren’t open-ended.”
When asked what my goal for the day, the week, the month, or the year was, my answer would always be one of very few variants. Keep drawing, keep writing, keep living. It seemed to be all that mattered to me back then, and now that my mind is secure and my life is slightly more stable than it was even a year ago, I begin to go back to that question and contemplate the possibility of a different answer.
I humor the thought of making a concrete goal for myself, but it’s at these times that my anxious mind and my rational mind seem to join hands with the sole purpose of reminding me why I was in such a state of refusal in the first place. If I can create a goal for myself that I truly care about, I will. There’s little else in my life that I care about more than my own mind and the minds of those in my stories, and so to create a goal for myself to “Keep writing” with no other strings attached is the easiest way to keep me on my feet that I could possibly think of.
So now that I’m fairly close to being considered an adult, what has my dream turned into? What was my dream when I was a child? When I get older, will I have to abandon my dreams for the sake of succumbing to the will of society?
I’ve decided rather early on that I don’t want to give up on my dreams, and I don’t want to sacrifice myself for the sake of a system that I don’t care for. For as long as I have hands and the ability to think, I’ll keep writing, and that seems to be the only statement I can say with absolute certainty. I can remember countless dreams that I’ve given up on the moment I moved away from New Jersey as a child.
I remember wanting to take ballet classes – my mother told me we didn’t have the money to go through with it. I also remember wanting to become an actor – my anxiety shot me between the eyes the moment I took a drama class and had to go onstage. Somehow, though, even now I find myself fantasizing. I’ll admit, it’s been almost a nightly routine for me since January to listen to music at night and allow my mind to wander. As of the past few months, my music picks for this time have been almost exclusive to the musical soundtracks for Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula, and Frankenstein. I’ll be up pacing until the early hours in the morning, latest until four-thirty, simply entertaining the thought of acting or animating to the songs I hear.
It is during the daytime that I seek rest to avoid the hectic sounds of my cousin and uncle going through the house, but well past midnight is when my mind comes alive. My friends are asleep, the others in the house are asleep, and I am left alone to my thoughts, to my dreams of passion and fury; it makes me wonder if I should pursue acting again. I’m a creature of the night, I suppose, but during the daytime I find myself doubting my ability under the limelight, and resume my rightful place as the writer behind my own stories; such is the way of my world.
Even as I got older, I haven’t forgotten about my dreams. Every now and again, I indulge in a piece of my history, whether it be a show I used to watch as a child or a video game I used to love. It’s an odd feeling to realize that while I’m much older than I was back then, I still find the same joy in the stories that inspired me.
My question still hasn’t been answered, though – what’s my dream right now? If I had to put my finger on it, I suppose I want to create something that would outlive me. My mind is too vast to put every portion of it into words, my writing speed can’t keep up with the nights spent awake as new storylines are imagined and reimagined within minutes. The subject of my own mortality was something that used to haunt me, primarily because I want noting more than to see my ideas visualized on paper and made real.
As a writer, and as an artist, I would love nothing more than to see my fantasies come to fruition. To see storylines finally get written out, to see pictures drawn and animations made – a large part of my life from middle school until now was simply spent in waiting for my skills to put my ideas to justice. My motivation to get better at art isn’t for the sake of art itself, but instead a part of that faraway fantasy that maybe, one day, I can sketch out the inner workings of my imagination properly.
If I became a great artist, I could see my characters visualized. If I became a great author, I could show the people around me what’s been taking up every aspect of my life for so long.
My dream is to keep writing, my dream is to keep drawing, and my fantasies are too numerous to count.
I wonder if those of you reading this have dreams of your own, too.
I wonder if you’re willing to give up on your dreams because the demon of depression told you that you should.
Thank you for reading, thank you even more if you understand me. Goodnight.
Ciel.
Luciel Stardust 