To dream

When I was young, I remember standing outside with my friends at night staring up at the sky and watching it glitter like studded satin.
And every once in a while, one light, a bit brighter than the others, would tear across the black sky and one of my friends would proclaim, “Look! It’s a shooting star!” And I would stare up at the light, my eyes following it as it traveled across the sky. The light would fill my heart with joy and wishes and put a smile on my face as some snot-nosed brat popped my wonder with, “Nah, it’s just an airplane.”
In the episode “Dream On” of “Glee”, Jesse St. James (played by the amazingly talented Jonathan Groff) defined a dream as “something that fills up the emptiness inside, the one thing that you know if it came true, all the hurt would go away.” Those airplanes I saw were what I thought were dreams that could fill my life with happiness and push out all worries and problems I had and would face.
I was, and still am, a fervent dreamer- for as long as I can remember, I would never really recall some of the things happening in classes and the events around me because I was imagining another life: one where all my troubles were nonexistent and life went my merry way.
However, whenever the question of what I wanted to do with my life came up this year, I was stumped. In all the dreaming- the fantasies of being a doctor, an artist, a superhero and a Broadway actor, all which faded as my attention shifted to something else I caught interest in- I realized that all my dreams were just airplanes in the night sky, fake wishes that were substituted for passions that I would fervently pursue.
Suddenly, I was jerked from my dream life into reality, where the airplanes that I had misidentified as dreams suddenly disappeared. I found no passion, no drive and sadly, no will to dream any longer among the lights that dotted the sky. I no longer knew what a true dream was after chasing airplanes for so long. I became lost, cautiously observing everything that I could perceive as a dream.
Amidst all the wandering this year, I met and got the chance to interview three amazingly passionate and interesting people. As I talked to them about their lives, dreams and goals, I found myself asserting the reason why I had no dreams: I had no passion. I had met two people who were in their dream careers, spreading their love for what they did and another who worked day and night to break into his dream job and I finally realized that passion is something one is willing to work at, to sacrifice all one’s time to practice, spread and love what they do.
My dream now is to find my dream, my true passion in life. As I head off to the University of California- San Diego next year, I will keep this foundation for my dream safely tucked away in my back pocket so that when the opportunity arrives, I can catapult myself into the sky, soaring past the airplanes and the star clusters to reach that shooting star, the true dream that I had yearned so long for.