In kindergarten, my fellow five-year-old friends and I were assigned to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up.
The room was full of astronauts who painted that piece of paper with a starry galaxy and a spaceship. I sat among little boys and girls who dreamed of wearing Olympic gold medals around their necks or having their shelves decorated in Superbowl rings. To my left and right were children all answering the prompt with an adamance to grow up and be the image they’d put in their head.
And I told my teacher I wanted to be a pop star.
I could picture it perfectly: the sea of screams, cheers, and applause. If I closed my eyes, I could see the tremendous mansion with a fountain out front and a graceful spiral staircase inside like the ones the princesses and the celebrities on my television walked down. I wanted a title with my name, applause in my presence, and a life that felt “big.” Not a monotonous one, stuck in what I thought to be my own boring corner of the world. I saw the river that wrapped around my cozy town as a rope, tightening with every day I spent there.
I longed to get out one day; not because I hated it here but because the grass seemed greener elsewhere.
The opulence of the girls in my magazines seemed to be more interesting than mine with their dresses so intricately made and their hair so perfectly done; with their picture-perfect smiles and their very existence seeming a million times more important than mine.
I cannot pinpoint the very moment when I no longer yearned for that childhood fantasy. But I know that the day I stopped searching for a spotlight to find myself under, scouring for a sliver of fame to my name, was very much not the day I gave up. For the little girl in the kindergarten classroom might have felt as though I’d thrown my dreams away, and she probably would’ve wondered why I had merely “settled.”
But that little girl also never learned that when she was told to dream “big,” she was also allowed to just dream.
For no fairytale estate or level of adoration from strangers could ever match up to the people who make my little corner of the world seem big.
Like my childhood best friend who once sat outside with me drawing chalk murals from dawn to dusk only for it to rain the next day. Like biking to the ice cream store with my neighborhood friends only to buy the least expensive thing on the menu so we didn’t all go broke. Even like my newfound lab partners in biology who always seem to make stupid jokes at the worst times but never fail to make me laugh until my ribs hurt.
There is something especially freeing about dreaming for people like them and more moments like the ones I have made.
Perhaps that little girl sitting on the circle rug amongst her peers would’ve felt like such a dream was too small or too ordinary. Maybe she would’ve felt disappointed, sitting there with the drawing of a pop star in her hands and a flawless image in her head and wondering how one could abandon something like that.
Yes, the pop star has the roar of the crowd to listen to and the smiles of millions of strangers looking adoringly up at her, but I have the luxury of the seemingly simple things that simultaneously have filled my life with color.
