I was never a fan of video games. I never knew how to level up, or catch enough coins. Clash of clans and Farmville to this day, do not seem appealing. But I was also never a fan of the game Sims either. Living for two people just seems so unnecessary. Yeah, I’ll pay $40 to relive a few errands…
There was this one game though. I was completely addicted to it when I was in the fifth grade. It was the Hasbro Dreamlife Interactive Tv- plug in Game.
I don’t think you’ll know what that is because it was never a famous game that all the kiddos were playing in my time. But, because my mother thought video games were from the devil himself, I never actually owned one. Instead, I spent my time lying in the grass until the sun crept under the earth. My mom’s opportunity cost was scrubbing off grass stains from my clothes.
Dreamlife was as close as I ever got to a remote controlled video game. You were given the ability to create a teenager however you wanted. She had an allowance, a job, soccer practice, and homework. Don’t ask me how it was called “Dreamlife” or why I believed it was one, but I did. Feeling locked up and sheltered in an apartment, I could pretend I had a sweet boyfriend, three best friends, and I could “enjoy” the liberty of going to the latest and greatest party or sleepover in town.
For some reason my head had a lust for the typical Disney Channel life of a teenager.
Throughout the game I saved up my allowance. I saved, and saved until I could remodel my bedroom. Then I started saving up for a car. Then finally…I bought everything capable of buying. I wasn’t broke. I was incidentally too rich to be happy. Because being “too rich” and buying everything in the highest level, meant the game was over, and my little life took a cold halt. There was nothing left to buy, nothing left to develop.
Stupid Walmart game.
I went back to staring at leaves in the yard.
Then my dad would probably drag me inside to practice some questions for my next TAKS test. And as I got older, I got dragged inside for SATs too.
And then for the ACTs.
There wasn’t any time for Walmart games and leaves anymore. “Real” life hit.
All my life my dad was pretty intense about education and a rewarding job.
“I brought you to this country so you could have better opportunities. In order to get a good job, you’ve got to go to college, you’ve got to get that degree, and you’ve got have that successful salary”.
He branded me with these words from the moment I could understand them.
School, college, job, happiness. Got it dad.
But if there’s anything I hated more than anything, it was the idea of “learning”
I hated linear functions, I hated grammar, and I hated history.
Christopher Columbus sucked for killing off so many Indians, don’t let the little jingle from kindergarten fool you.
In school, I learned that America was a country made for freedom. But my life never felt like mine, so freedom seemed like it was just a pleasant word to write on an AP U.S History essay.
I learned a formula for calculus and a few dates in history because I had a test the next day. The information that I recited in my head was solid enough to receive an “A” on the exam but it slowly crept away the night after, leaving me bear and unreliable, for the next test.
I slept through my classes.
I tricked the system unto believing I was a bright intellectual by figuring out the SYSTEM, instead of exactly learning what it was trying to teach.
I did more of my thinking in the grass as a kid, or swinging. I could swing for hours and hours at a time. My mother said if I sat on a swing all day, my butt would remain flat. Nonetheless it was a worthy sacrifice, despite the side effects.
Swinging always gave me an urge to let go. Sometimes, I felt like I had the capability of flying, but I never did jump off. Then after hours of swinging, I would lay on the ground to keep the world from spinning. As soon as the world was still again, I could ride my bike back home.
When I was a child, a little girl named Paige would love to play this hand game with me. She would grab my wrist and squeeze it tight. She would hold on for 30 whole seconds, and as a child, it felt like 30 minutes. Then, she would pick at the center of my palm like she was pulling imaginary strings from the center. My hand felt like it had puppet strings.
“Do you feel the spider web??”She would say.
My skin would crawl as I would nod in anxiousness.
That’s sometimes how I felt like, when I laid in grass.
My body was still enough to feel slight tugs around every increment of my body.
Was I breathing? I’m not sure.
There was oxygen in the atmosphere, but I’m not sure if that’s what I was truly inhaling. Sometimes I felt drugged. High on words. Words that were drilled into my mind since I was small. School. College. Career. Kids. Retirement.
Eat, breath, sleep.
There were strings everywhere. Invisible, like threads from a web but, strong like boy-scout rope. I felt a tug. First on my head, then my arms, then on my index finger tip.
I was a puppet, claiming to be a “real” girl.
Free?
Maybe.
But so are the mentally disordered patients who are fighting against their “insanity” or their actual physically confined walls they have as their homes.
Maybe it’s because some are told they’re crazy when they think outside the box. Maybe they’re actually crazy, I don’t know. You wouldn’t be able to tell because if they came into an insane asylum healthy, they wouldn’t be when they would come out. And they wouldn’t be able to leave, until they could call themselves “crazy”.
“To solve a problem, you have to first admit that you have one”
Hmm. What a catch 22.
I’m not bashing on rehab centers. Some are excellent, and I’m grateful these centers have been provided all around the U.S. But not every “cure” is an actual “cure” to a “sickness”
Deviant individuals of this world have been claimed to look like people like Lady Gaga. Wear geometrical shapes on your chest, and suddenly you are the most loved deviant to every young person in the world.
Feeling controlled, I resurrected from the grassy ground wanting to deceive my world even more. I wanted to be ahead of the game with humanity. I wanted to distort the minds of authority and treat them like lab rats. They believed themselves to be the teachers and leaders in my life, so I humored them. In reality, they just became variables to my own equation.
Psychological books became my first spoonful of adult literature. I read parenting books to fool my parents. I read teacher blogs to deceive my teachers. It was simple. Not easy, but pleasurable.
The robot found the remote.
As devious, as I sounded as a kid, I wasn’t all that cynical, or intelligent for that matter.
Yet, Christ continued to reveal that I had the ability to learn.
The more I read, the more I didn’t want to play this twisted game of “Dreamlife”. I wanted my own life.
I understood humanity for what it was and not for what my “freedom” told me it was. I wasn’t supposed to go to college so I could get a degree to work successfully UNDER someone that was more successful than I. I was supposed to play it safe, so I could work under the risk takers. The ones that actually DREAMED.
Society told me to get an “education”. Leaders of the world told me to get the certifications required, to be a successful WORKER. Not a dreamer.
Go to law school and you can be a lawyer. You can work under the government and enforce rules that you forget to question because hey they’ve been there for years.
There was a sociological study once performed. This experiment varies in how it’s laid out, nonetheless it draws the same conclusion. However the one I read that has been the most recent ….
There were two sides of sticks on a table. One side had one stick, while the other side contained sticks that were all different sizes and only one matched the size of the individual stick from the other side. One was clearly taller than all of the rest of the sticks from either side. A small child could’ve pointed to the right stick because there was such an obvious answer to the problem. People were lined up to pick the stick that resembled closely to the original one on the opposite side. A group of people there, were paid to pick the drastically incorrect stick that was clearly taller than the original one. The few others that were invited to the experiment didn’t know this, and when they tried picking the correct stick, they hesitated, and picked the incorrect taller one. They had seen the majority choose the incorrect tall stick to be the correct answer. They all had conformed their opinions, instead of sticking to their own guns.
Maybe Lady Gaga would have chosen the correct one. I’m not sure. But I would hope I would’ve. Sometimes I don’t know if I would’ve.
As time strolled along, my mentality of how I treated the system changed. I had flooded myself with so many good words. I realized I didn’t have to play along to any game. There shouldn’t have been a system I should have been “fooling”, in the first place. I wasn’t sure why I couldn’t just jump off the swinging motions of life and just simply fly.
So I finally did.
This didn’t look like you would think. I didn’t become a hipster, hate lawyers, quit college or remodel my wardrobe,
My mind did the only makeover.
I wanted to know why I was pledging my body to a life of random motions and choices, I personally, did not decide to make on my own. I was no longer ashamed for not wanting a mansion when I grew up, I was happy with how I lived now. I was happy to believe my life was successful now, because I soaked in everything I already had. And that’s what encouraged me to prosper. I was successful because my desires always grew from the roots that were already planted from the beginning. I never figured out my dad’s pursuits of happiness, but I knew mine, and it wasn’t based on my future salary.
I felt like I was living my dreams every day. I was free.
I’m grateful that I go to college…. now. I feel like it’s a privilege to own a library card now. My mind is blown by the world right now, at this very moment. I don’t have to be a lawyer to feel satisfied, I feel empowered RIGHT NOW. God has blessed me with the ability to grow as a human being. He gives me this ability not to trick the system, but to LEAVE IT. And I’m glad I get to leave it without silly shapes on my chest, I guess that’s a perk too.
I love waking up in the morning with bliss and not strings.
I grab a bag of grapes, my book bag, highlighters, and make my way to community college. Sometimes I wish I could transfer sooner than later, but that was the price I made when I didn’t care. But that’s a lie, because I did.
And most kids do.
But when you beat a kid over and over with a formula of “happiness” and “success”, and you don’t explain the foundation or the reasons for the variables that feel required, you would sleep through calculus too.
I suck at math and I never understood its purpose so that’s what I did. And now I’m reaping that horrible seed I sowed of ignorance. Luckily, I have a dear friend of mine that tutors me when I feel like Finite Math will be the death of me. But here’s what I love about Jane. She doesn’t tell the steps like any ordinary teacher would. She explains the bigger picture of why there are steps. She takes the time to give me the reason for a quadratic function and the reason of why there’s a vertex, a maximum and a minimum. She drives the foundation of the math principle into my brain to understand the numerical fruit that bears right after it. Isn’t that genius, and so simple at the same time?
Maybe the kids that don’t care… DO. And maybe that’s why they’re not cooperating with the system. Why do anything that you’re not passionate for? Sounds like you’re wasting your time, if you ask me.
We as humans have been told prosperity looks like a person with a nice car, a beautiful house, and the ability to retire young. Great…and then what do I do?
Game over. Buy a new one at Walmart.
I’m not saying don’t be lawyer, or don’t go to Law school. But what I am saying is, figure out WHY you’re going through eight to twenty years of college.
I’m not promoting you to be a bum either. I’m not promoting you to NOT care. I’m promoting you to figure out on your own why you want a big house and a nice car. Owning a castle is not a sin. Owning a castle and being bored with it, should be.
One of my biggest dreams as a kid was to give every orphan in Africa a bowl of rice, every day for the rest of my life. But now I see the problem in that.
I’m going to die eventually.
Then what will the orphans do?
Now …
I’ve developed my vision for malnourished children in a different manner now. It is better to give a starving child the knowledge of how to cultivate food on their own, than to give them a bowl of temporary goodness. I want to teach them like Jane taught me. That way, they’ll have the desire to use what they have now to do more in the future later. That’s freedom. It’s the liberty to figure things out on your own, while soaking in the valuable resources given in the process.
But as wonderful as that dream is, I don’t always dream this way.
There have been many times throughout the year that I’ve woken up and have forgotten about the bliss that usually floats in the air. I go to History class loathing Christopher Columbus all over again. I feel stupid for not reclining against my pillow and turning on Netflix. I forget about the reasons I go from studying for a psychology exam to writing all over a psychology book I got from the library. It scarcely makes sense sometimes. I could be looking at Pinterest. I could be staring at the many vintage ways of creating a home library, for my future house I’ll have due to a “great” career. But then I look at the pile of books on my table and see much more beauty in the clutter of bent bindings and sticky notes, than the rusty mystic looking library I see on my laptop screen. REALITY, is beautiful.
Maybe I’ll have that library one day, but my yearning for it only begins, by reading the books I have now.
I am living my dream. My dream to keep dreaming… All on my own.
Then I start to remember why it makes sense to keep studying beyond the reasons of an exam. This isn’t for anyone but myself.
And here’s the cool part.
It’s not only for myself sometimes…
Like any other person, I have friends. I have family. I have people that enjoy my advice and enjoy my input. They love to ask questions because they think I will give them an answer. But sometimes giving an answer isn’t the answer. I don’t want to be the one that types down an exact text a friend would need, to reply to a boy that they like. I want people to know HOW and WHY they should reply with their own answer. It would be coated with wisdom, if a person could do a little research digging themselves. Like I want to teach the next orphan how to plant grain, I want to teach my girl friend how to speak her own words to the opposite gender in confidence, and knowledge and not of steps. No one needs to starve themselves, when opportunities are there to devour.
A book called “the curse of the ‘good girl’”, taught me that. An author with a degree in Psychology wrote it. How about that? College does some good.
I’m not sure if I’ll graduate college to be completely honest. It’s not a goal of mine. My goal is to soak up as much education as possible. Maybe that will look like getting a degree, but that’s not the goal. My library on my table may take me back to Peru one day. My father might be furious to think that I view a successful life as a life in Peruvian turmoil (that he had already once drug me out of), but I could respectively care less. Maybe those are where some of my dreams lie. I don’t entirely know at the moment. But here’s something I do know. Dreams aren’t limited in quantity or value. They don’t have to be far fetching either. One of my dreams as a child was to be the girl without road rage despite rush hour traffic, and guess what? I am that girl. Sorry, it wasn’t something cool like being president in ten years, or something. Ironically, it was the little wishes that drove me to believe the bigger ones were capable of occurring. The little steps allowed me to believe in the bigger leaps of faith.
But…
Why are we only celebrating when the system does something right? Why are we done rejoicing when we finally receive that diploma? Why are we only feeling satisfied, when people around us are pleased? Why do we not stick to our own guns sometimes?
Why are we letting so many false authority figures, be the only risk takers?
Why are we playing it safe?
NOT questioning society makes my skin crawl, more than the spider webs I felt as a kid.
I am not a puppet
I am a real girl.
Prospering,
Breathing,
Dreaming
LIVING.
More importantly, I am a product of the ultimate Chief of Prosperity. So here I am.
Actively existing.
The Inhale Before the Exhale 