When I Grow Up

When the adults in my life say that I “lack passion and drive,” what they really mean is that the things I am passionate about are not the things they want me to build my future on. Ever since I was little I have been told stories of lazy pigs that have built houses from straw and twigs or grasshoppers that have wasted the days away by dancing and playing. It is instilled in my head that those who do not work their hardest cannot be successful. However, despite the many people telling me I need to get a hard job to live a good life, if you were to ask me right now what I want to be when I grow up I would tell you it’s my absolute dream to be an artist.

Since I was a kid I have been answering the dreaded “what do you want the rest of your life to look like?” question with rehearsed answers my parents fed me over the years. Six year old me wanted to be a scientist, ten year old me wanted to be an engineer, fourteen year old me wanted to be a doctor, or at least, this is what I was told I wanted to be. According to my parents, these were the only careers that could give me a happy life. And my parents were happy, so how could they be wrong?

As I grew up, hobbies became passions and school became a chore and most importantly, I felt as if they didn't really overlap with each other anymore. Freshman year I replaced my art class with AP Psychology, and then sophomore year I “had” to take AP Computer Science instead of a drawing course. As school became less about what I loved and more about what I felt I needed to learn for a good career, my education seemed to be a long, dark tunnel and art was my only way to make it through to the other side. But how does one define what a good artist is? How could I measure my success, or prove myself and my talents to others? According to my teachers, I wasn't an artist. I was a kid who liked to doodle instead of pay attention in class, and whose empty quizzes were scribbled with defeated drawings in a vain effort to win over some pity points.

Today I am sixteen years, 8 months, and 17 days old. I haven't lived as long as my teachers or my parents have, and I probably don’t know as much about life as they do. But I do know myself better than anyone else, and I know that for the 6,103 days that I've been alive, art has been my haven. It is my brick house that protects me from the wolves, and the supply that gets me through the sparse winter seasons. I do not know what career path I will choose or what my life will look like 20 years from now, but I believe that when I am an adult and a little girl tells me that when she grows up she wants to be an artist, I will ask her to call me when she gets famous.