When I Grow Up...

When you're a kid, people normally ask you the same question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" When I was a kid, my common answer was "An architect", because I thought what my Tita Chinky did -- making houses look incredible and getting to design on a daily basis -- was the most amazing job opportunity, ever.

In grade school, as my interest in ballet grew, my answer to this common question became, "A professional ballet dancer." Jodie from the movie Center Stage was who I really wanted to be. I dreamt of traveling to New York City, living in an enormous penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park, and having my own hotdog stand in the penthouse kitchen. When my cousin, Cheryl, and I talked about dancing for a living, we imagined ourselves living together, dreamt of ways to turn the hotdog stand into a salad bar on days when our ballet mistresses required us to lose weight, and drew an image of us two, each performing our dream ballets at the Lincoln Center for a full house that would stamp their feet and demand for an encore after we performed.

When I reached high school and experienced my first, big physical injury, I set aside a small box filled with loose change that I had deemed my "Juilliard Fund" and turned to bigger dreams. When people asked me that same question in high school, my answer would shift constantly: "A writer/journalist", "A ballet teacher", "A school teacher", "A fashion designer", "An interior designer." Because of the different things and people I was exposed to, my interests for the future changed drastically, as well. I knew that I needed to do something creative as a profession, but the specific job title loomed over me as a giant question mark.

When college started and I instinctively shifted to a Literature course, I believed I knew what I wanted to do. Whenever people asked me that same question, I would -- and continue to, still -- say, "We'll see." As I began my major Literature courses, I fell in love with the written word and thought I knew what I wanted to be: a lawyer. I had a gut feeling that because I had ended up in this course, wherein being a critic and analyst and creative thinker are the criterion for excellence, that I needed to continue what my dad has been doing for most of his successful life. I participated well in class, read everything I needed to, and found enjoyment in arguing with my thirteen or so other classmates about the writings of different literary critics.

But as I continued to write and read (and write and read) on a daily basis, my heart continued to find dance. When I visited Paris over the summer, I fell in love with bustling romance of the city and knew I had to find a place there for my future. Being in the city allowed me to go back and recall the reasons why I had dropped my hope for a future of dance, in the first place. I realized that no matter how much I didn't believe that dance could be a profession, I always just kept coming back to it.

A few months have passed and I have read the books, talked to all the right people, browsed through images and looked back on old videos, and even went on a spiritual retreat -- hoping that all of these things would help me find what I needed to settle, which is what to do when the time comes for me to graduate. Despite all of these important factors and inspirations, the answer to that common question, once again, would still have to be, "We'll see."

I believe opportunities expose themselves once one is at a crossroads, when one has dropped everything the mind had been holding back as unnecessary baggage, and when there is nothing left to do but have faith. The year is long and I have a couple more months left to decide what it is I want to pursue as a profession, but I know that what I want to do is not too distant from what I am doing at this very moment.

*All photos from Google images