Dream yourself the life you want; then fight for it.

(This was originally written in 2018, but I think it still fits my voice well today.)

One of the hardest things I have found out about life as I’ve grown older is fulfilling dreams. 

I mean as kids we are always told to “dream big” or “go after your dreams” and we let ourselves have these massive dreams and try our hardest to go for them, and then we graduate high school and our world gets ten times bigger, and suddenly these dreams we have are put on hold. 

For example, Since 7th grade I have dreamed of being an actress, my soul was set on fire the first time I ever picked up a script and walked out onto that stage, and that fire burns so hot inside the very core of who I am that when I think about being an actress still I physically feel like I’m either going to explode, throw up, vibrate out of my skin, or all of the above. That passion is what I and the rest of us have always been told to pursue, but suddenly I wasn’t in high school anymore and I didn’t have a play to try out for every few months, my life was lacking structured days, and I had bills to pay.

And the experience of course isn’t the same for all of us, but I have noticed that for a lot of us, our dreams suddenly don’t seem so attainable to us anymore. We have jobs to work to pay our bills, and our free time is spent trying to forget about the jobs we have for just a few fleeting hours so we feel some semblance of humanity again. Most people when asked what they want to do with their lives respond with “I don’t know” or they answer with that dream they’ve always had and follow it up with “but that’s probably never going to happen” and when you ask someone why this dream is somehow unattainable, more often than not you receive a “oh it’s not practical” or an “I just don’t have time to go after something that might not work out”

So, I just want to ask us, myself included, when did our hopes and dreams for the future stop being goals and start being nuisances? When did we decide that our happiness and our career goals were nothing but fantasies and stuff of books?

The answer is simple, the only thing that changed is we stopped listening to the little kid inside of us that believed anything is possible and started only listening to the adult in us who was afraid of failure. Let me tell you something I’ve learned the hard way; you have to listen to BOTH of those voices in your head if you want any kind of success in life.

The little kid inside of us is beyond important. This presence is what gives us the ability to feel like if we believed hard enough, we could breathe under water, or if we looked in enough wardrobes we’d be bound to find Narnia eventually. The child inside of us is what gives us this unwavering sense of importance in what we do with our everyday lives and this unprecedented passion to do it: this voice needs to be heard, no matter what age you are now, let the child inside of you out of its cage.

Now on the other hand you have the adult inside of you, the you, you are now almost all of the time. The you that knows when your bills are due, when your auto withdrawal happens and when you need to wake up to get to work. This is the you that makes sure you have a stable income and that no matter how hard it is to get out of bed that morning the adult in you pulls you by your boot straps and slides you into your battle armor and saddles you up to face the day; this voice must be heard, this voice must be ever present and beyond firm.

Both of these voices are equally important in the pursuit of happiness. If you cage that child in your heart and throw away the key to your dreams, you will spend your life in a constant loop of living to work. You’ll forget who you want to be and who you are and you’ll struggle to find any semblance of your soul worthwhile to yourself anymore, so let the child out, let them have power inside of you again, but remember to keep them calm and balanced with the presences of the adult inside of you. Keep the adult standing firmly next to your inner child to help reel them in when the dreams get away from them. You must find a balance, or you’ll never find yourself.

Humanity as a whole doesn’t take life seriously enough… but we also take life way too seriously. Honestly, when was the last time you just stopped rushing around and just sat still and let yourself breathe without the adult part of your brain running a mile a minute to remind you of everything that needs to get done?

We are only human and that means we are programmed to make mistakes and fail, but each failure is just small lessons that help us grow into better people.

I’m not perfect; you’re not perfect, heck no one person is perfect, and that’s the beauty of life, it isn’t perfect either and that’s why we need to stop cutting our dreams down at the roots before they even have a chance to bloom.

Take some time and rediscover yourself. Reinvent who you want to be, revive who you're meant to be and embrace that person. You can’t honestly sit there and find a single person doing what you’ve always dreamed to do that will tell you it was easy. Because that’s the beautiful thing about life. It. Isn’t. Easy. You have to fight for it, and play for it, and dream for it and live for it. Because the moment you stop living to work, and you start loving to live is the moment you’ll rediscover the passion I know that is dancing in your veins as you read, burning your nerves and setting them ablaze for something truly amazing. 

The “you” you are and the “you” you want to be, can be the same person, you just need to have a little faith and a lot of patience. Hard work pays off and besides, we get one life; who says we have to stop dreaming of the best one there is?

Light and love,

Darcy Micaela