Day Four: Dream big

One of the disadvantages of getting older is realizing that we’re not as invincible as we once imagined ourselves. Somewhere in between growing pains and student loan payments, most of us give up on our childhood delusions of grandeur.

What was your big childhood dream? Are you still pursuing it? If yes, how? If no, how did you reconcile that within yourself?

As my friend Mary likes to remind me, I attended Career Day in the 5^th grade as a supermodel. I really wish I were kidding. Mary remembers this because our teacher didn’t allow anyone to dress as professional athletes as it wasn’t “realistic”, and Mary, ten year old sage that she was, pointed out that my chance of making it as the next Crawford was equally slim.

The truth was that we were all private school kids desperate for an out of uniform day, and we were just trying to bend our sweet duds to our career of choice. For example, Mary wanted to wear a soccer jersey (hence, professional soccer player) and I wanted to wear my sweet new Gap overalls (perhaps you remember this time in fashion history?) while also impressing my boyfriend, who seemed poised to break up with me in favor of the girl who was coming dressed as Baby Spice.

Is your head exploding yet?

In actuality, I didn’t want to be a supermodel. Perhaps recognizing that my looks would be put to better use behind the scenes, I actually wrote in my Career Day essay that I wanted to be a young adult novelist. Never one to devise a plan without ample details, I had already amassed a large collection of original short stories about crime-fighting junior high twins Samantha and Alexa Hill. I ran out of original ideas after Book #4 (The Case of the Missing Cello - let me know if you'd like an original Xerox of this), and I began to borrow plots heavily from Nancy Drew and the Boxcar Children from there on out.

Obviously, I’m not a young adult novelist. However, about 50% of my job is writing, and I’ve been rocking this blog for 3+ years, much to the delight of my friends trying to kill time at work. Last, I’m also looking into adult writing classes in Minneapolis this spring, so I think I’m still in pursuit of a small piece of my childhood dream.

Oh and I’ve also never appeared in Vogue. I don’t really want to talk about it, except to say that Petra Nemcova could never pull off overalls like I did.