How She Lost Her Dreams
She sat there quietly, staring out into space. Her imagination rampant with images, dreams and sometimes the replaying of old memories that consisted of television shows, movies and other events that had happened in her life.
Everything else was second priority to her and her dreams. Great moments, epic battles and out of this world adventures fueled her flame to keep going, even despite the many scoldings she would receive.
She was told over and over again how her daydreaming would lead to nothing, how she was just procrastinating her time, how the childish thoughts that entered her head were only there to stop her from learning her academics.
She tried her hardest to do well in school. She did not want to be an underachiever or someone who was not committed to learning. In fact, she actually enjoyed learning. The main problem was not that the work was too hard or too boring, it was the simple fact that she was able to understand it too well and it left her feeling underwhelmed.
She loved to pass the time interacting with other kids, even when it was not appropriate. She would find herself with many scoldings of how she should be doing her work, of how and why she needed to be quiet, stay in her seat and to not try to interact with other kids. Letters would be sent home to her parents so that they could know of how she was acting up in school, but her behavior would never stop for that was whom she was.
She quickly learned to bypass the time that she had spent being a nuisance to her teachers delving deep into her fantasy world where anything was possible. Her mind was constantly flowing with ideas and stores that would never stop. She was excited to lead herself into these adventures because for the most part, they would not get her in trouble.
Some of the teachers would notice her not paying attention in class and would call her out for her disobedience, but she continued to explore the unknown worlds of her mind.
In her mind, she could be anything that she wanted to be. She could be a pirate searching for booty in the high seas, or a dragon flying across the world wreaking havoc. She could explore outer space and interact with species not yet known to man. She could wield the force and be an epic Jedi battling the ever abundance of evil that cascaded throughout the universe.
Her mind was her sanctuary. She could run away from all of the bullies, mean teachers and events that she had to run away from in her life. It was her escape from reality, but when it was time to share where she had gone, everyone looked at her like she was a fool. No one told her to continue her journeys, to document them for others, to be able to grow them into worlds of their own. They told her to quit dreaming, to grow up, to face the responsibilities that were before her.
Her dreams continued though and she continued to find solitude in her mind. Sometime she would try to explain her worlds to others, only to be ridiculed. She could never understand why the world looked at her so when she tried to express how she thought or what she thought about. She was made to feel stupid when she should have been made to feel adventurous. She was tossed out in the cold when the warmth that people had to offer should have embraced her.
With her siblings, she was able to play out some of her dreams that allowed for all of them to get away from the world that they lived. They would play doctor, house, store, community, spy and a bunch of other games that would take their mind off of the reality that was the world. Sometimes she created the games from her dreams to get them to help clean the house, other times she would play the roles to help them forget that they were hungry, hurt or sad.
She would use her dreams to live because, in reality, she could not be alive. She was forced into a world where she had to prove herself in feats that she constantly did not want to achieve; yet somehow she was able to.
She hardly recognized herself in the mirror and each passing day made it harder than the next to continue to live in reality. Her dreams became her only escape and she did not know how to cope with life without them. Her life became torture. Each day passing with less and less hope that somehow the world would make sense. She desperately wanted out, which made her focus on finding a way.
When she was a teenager it was drugs first, which did not fully mask the pain that she had building up inside of her. Then it was the bottle of Tylenol that was supposed to make her go to sleep forever but only added a completely miserable week to her life. She kept trying to escape, only to continually find herself in situations that she had no way of getting out of. She thought that when she let people in on her secret that they would somehow help her with her problems, but it only seemed to push them farther away.
Somehow she continued to push through life making decisions that did not sit well with her or be part of anything that she ever wanted to accomplish. She continued to look for that way out as she fell down a path that was both hard and disastrous for whom she truly was. She became gross and incompetent throwing away both of her dreams and her intelligence to become a complete tool for society. She became hard and chiseled. She tried every day to fight back the tears, as her life became more of the reality than her dreams. She abandoned hope that she could ever exist happily and hoped that life would take her down the path that she needed to go. That somehow everything would make sense in the end. She could not even begin to understand how much more her existence would grow until it was totally inseparable from her being. She knew that she would not be able to face reality soundly or that she would grow completely restless in her current state. She wanted out and she continually made an effort. She wanted to exist freely as herself. She did not want to only be able to exist in her dreams. She did not want to be some fantasy that would never come true or a nighttime fable one would tell to themselves to be able to go to sleep at night. She continually pushed and prodded and her world continually came to way with who she wanted to be and what she was becoming. Her minds become torn as she completely waged war within herself. Her world in this reality was not a world that she could understand. There was so much difference laid down before her that she had no choice, but to try to rip the fabric from the seems.
That battle almost completely destroyed her once again. She almost decided that it would be worth not living at all than to keep living a life of complete misery. If violence was the only life that she knew in reality, then it would be an act of violence that would take her out from all of her worlds.
She was lucky enough to have not of made that choice; to be able to choose to embrace the dreams. Even though her alter ego’s reality died that day and her dreaming became a reality, she had to say goodbye to the imagination, to the growth that she had experienced, to what she was made of and what had kept her alive for so long. She had won the war, but in the battles she had lost pieces of herself that she would never be able to get back. It was mostly worth it in the end, but the sacrifices that she had to make still hurt until this day.
