As children, we spend much of our days dreaming. We wake up, daydreaming about last night’s fantasies of candy houses and fairy tales. During class, our mind wanders away to worlds unknown and situations unseen, thinking of another time. And then, we return to our slumber, to our special worlds that only we know, until we have to wake and reenter reality.
When adults ask us what we want to be when we grow up, we think of the craziest things. One boy in my class told everyone he wanted to be a sailor. A girl next to me with platinum blonde hair said she wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be a writer. And back then, all of us believed we could. We all thought our dreams to be true. For most of us, our dreams continue to thrive. But for some, they slowly fade, or they are crushed in the smallest of moments.
A third grader returns home from school one day with their art portfolio full of watercolor butterflies, landscapes, and then a very creative rendition of a family photo that she brought to school to recreate. She’s beaming as she shows her mother and father, thinking how wonderfully happy they all will be, until they aren’t. Her mother and father raise an eyebrow and give the characteristic shrug, and then a compliment from the handbook of uninterested statements:
“Wow, that’s great, dear.”
“What is it supposed to be?”
“My, how interesting.”
Their tones are so dry that it isn’t hard for the little girl to realize the truth: her parents don’t think it’s good. So she asks them if they like it and she tells them she wants to make artwork, for her job someday. And then one of the worst dream killing sentences to ever be vocalized leaves her mother’s mouth, as if it is rehearsed:
“Will that make you any money, honey?”
The little girl doesn’t have an answer. The sliver of her that thought that she could do it, that she could really be an artist and show her artwork all around the world, starts to shrink back even further. She eats her dinner and the rest of the night is mundane. Then school rolls around. Her art teacher worries about her interest in the class when her fruit bowl recreations become more or less the bare minimum, and nothing close to the work that she used to produce.
Over the years, her artwork dwindles and she begins to take other classes: politics, accounting, and marketing. All classes that her parents swear will make her money and get her a good job. In her dreams, however, the little girl is always doing one thing. Not government work. Definitely not calculating numbers or producing advertisements for companies. No, in her dreams, the girl is always painting.
We don’t realize the power of our words and the ways that we can affect people. Sometimes even the smallest of comments shrink back our hopes, our dreams, and reduce them to little more than fantasy. The truth is, how much money the girl makes doesn’t matter. Not entirely. She will find a job, support herself, and that’s the end of that. But the most important question at the end of the day, after she can pay the bills and she has a stable home situation, still remains to be this: is she happy with how her life is?
