How Medium Made Me Rethink My Childhood Dream

I might, I can, I will, I must.

What do you want to be when you grow up, Elizabeta?

( silence )

Cotton candy, so sweet and fun. Dream on, sweet child, dream brave and dream dare. Let the world follow.

It always seemed like a blurry dream to me, a long-distance whisper, colors more vague than vividly bright, like a script left unread. I never spoke this word out loud: Writer. Not in front of anybody. It never slipped from the edge of my tongue. I always found a way to keep it hushed.

The word remained held in silence, quietly buried throughout the years to come, but the echo was persistent.

Raised in a family of entrepreneurs, dreaming big was allowed, and ambition was even an expected necessity, but not for being a poetic soul.

I had a chance to publish some short stories and poems in school magazines, and it always made me proud like nothing else in this world. I did not realize at that time why it felt so right, I was too young to distinguish that feeling from any other joy. You are young, you will have plenty more situations to find this fulfilling joy, right? The whole life is right in front of you. I did not understand at that time that this was my ‘why’ in this world.

Misplacement

The thing with any childhood dream is that it gets easily lost once the world starts whispering in your ears who you should be, putting layers of expectations on you — from your parents, from society, from your ego.

And we walk this world in search of meaning, in search of purpose, in search of an identity. Because all the time, we are missing that something that was misplaced long ago, somewhere deep inside of us, and only a few amongst us are lucky enough to understand how much courage is needed in order to fix this old misplacement.

So, if you are brave enough, with a grain of luck, you grow and begin to understand yourself better — truly knowing and trusting yourself. Then, you have the ability to shed the layers of socialization you were covered with over the years, and you have a chance to revert back to who you were before fears took root.

And then, you will have a deep look within yourself, and you will see your truest desires, needs, and feelings that belong to you and not to the world’s expectations. If you are really brave enough, you will maybe — only maybe — listen to yourself instead. And don’t think this is an easy task, no, it is an extremely hard one, one of the hardest challenges you will ever need to go through. Look at me, it took me a whole lifetime to even be brave enough to hear an echo. But when you do, oh boy, it is life-changing.

Hope

What I felt here, when I published my first article, was that my dream was given a voice after a long time of being kept in silence. It was alive and robustly brave and bold and started demanding my full attention. The echo turned into shouts.

And words started pouring. In the world of words, the dream had spoken, it found its way through the shadows of my choices, that my one tiny little silent dream about being an author one day.

I am here now, and I will do my best that I can on this journey and will not stop until I fulfill my mission to become a published author. My dream is alive now. It took me so much courage to bring it to life, and I won’t give up. Not because of this chance I was given to hear its sound, but because I owe that to my dream, to my young self.

It was quiet for too long.

So what do you want to be when you grow up, Elizabeta? — Writer.

Thank you for reading.