ME v. Me: Pipe Dreams

When I was a kid, I was a fiery little ball of energy and ambition, and if you had met me back then, you might’ve found it a bit amusing. I didn’t know where it came from, but by the age of 10, I had concocted a plan for my entire life, and I’d tell anyone who asked. My childhood friends still remember it, and sometimes they’d ask me to recite it just for fun. And I’d rattle off the same script every single time. It went a little something like this:

"My life goal is to graduate high school with a 4.0 GPA, go to college and double major in fashion design and fashion merchandising, move to New York, own my own clothing company, get married, and have two fashion-forward children." (I had a motor mouth, so read it again as if none of the words have spaces, and that's exactly how it sounded.)

Now, mind you, I was a 10-year-old who had absolutely no idea how to make any of that happen. I didn’t even know where I wanted to go to college, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t care. I guess I've always lived by the motto: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let's be real: at that point in life, I'm pretty sure my biggest concern was beating my personal record on the pacer test in P.E., not figuring out the logistics of a 10-year plan.

I also spent a lot of my free time sketching. I had this little red sketchbook, and I’d sit at my desk like some starving artist, sketching mockups of dresses as if I had bills to pay. My parents thought it was the cutest thing. They’d see me hunched over, totally absorbed, and just smile at the sight of my tiny designer dreams.

But, like most kids, I grew up. That polished little plan of mine started to feel more like a pipe dream. I wrote it off as a silly childhood fantasy and shifted my focus toward something more realistic, more grounded in the "real world."

It’s funny how life works, though, because here I am, over a decade later, writing this blog with my sights set on a career in the fashion and lifestyle industries as a marketing professional. A career that might just take me to New York after all. My younger self would be surprised to know that the dream she once gave up on is more adjacent to reality than she could have ever imagined.

Looking back, I realize now that what I once saw as a pipe dream wasn’t so impossible. I guess some dreams never really leave us—they just take their time coming full circle. And maybe, just maybe, there's no such thing as a pipe dream, because even 10-year-old me knew that where there’s a will, there’s a way.