The End of The Dream, or Just The Beginning of Another One

Childhood is like an endless, colorful, and incredible dream. But what happens when that dream comes to an end? You wake up in the real world, you start to see reality. I like to use this metaphor to describe my transition when I stopped being a child and I became a teenager. Perhaps it doesn’t feel the same for everyone, but for me, it felt like waking up in a nightmare. I started to see the whole panorama of the world, and it wasn’t only happiness and sweetness; there were more colors than just the rainbow. At that time, I felt everything was horrible and life didn’t make any sense, but with time, I started to appreciate the world more. Thus, in this blog entry, I’m going to share my experience in this process; then, I will explain how the book The Little Prince helped me; and lastly, I will explain how my perspective of life changed.

I remember how I started to wake up. I was nine, and my family and I were going through a lot of things. My mom started university again, my big brother started to study in the afternoon, and my dad started to work late. I wasn’t independent yet; I still needed help with my homework, to study, or to prepare myself for school, but no one could help me, everyone was busy. I had to learn how to do things by myself; I even had to start learning how to cook and how to take care of my little brothers. It was too much responsibility for a little girl. Maybe for that reason, everything felt like waking up in a nightmare. I remember I started to feel stressed and anxious, and no one realized that because everyone would say, “You are just too young to have worries.” But I did have worries; I was feeling terrible. I thought that perhaps they were right, and I only had to be more mature, but that didn’t help, I started behaving like an adult without being an adult. I only wanted to be a child like my friends. Now, looking at that, I realize how it has hurt me.

I started to realize and think about this situation one time when I watched a video of a song. The song was called Dream by Imagine Dragons, and I felt so related to the song. I felt that it described my feelings. This feeling about the world being a horrible mess was something that just didn’t make sense. ‘If we are living in a horrible world, what’s the point of living?” I used to ask myself. On the other hand, I also re-read the book The Little Prince, and this book had a completely different point of view. I had read the book when I was six, and while I was re-reading it, I remembered how I felt as a kid and how different were my feelings were at that time. The first time I read the book, I was fascinated. I felt very identified with the little prince, a kid misunderstood by adults. I even came to think that the little prince was real and that one day I would go to the desert to look for him. I cried a lot while reading the book because I realized that I had become that adult who did not understand children. Sometimes, no matter how bad the situation is, we have to learn to see the situations and our lives with the creativity and positivity that only a child has.

This book changed my perspective on the world completely. I was feeling horrible because I was focused only on the awful things. But what happens with the beautiful things in life? We have a lot of that too. The sun, the landscapes, nature, animals, people who love us, and the people that we love. There are horrible things in our world, yes, but that is not the whole world. There are so many more colors out there; some of them are bright, some are dull, and some others are gray, but all those colors are part of our lives. I believe that we need all those colors, not just the bright ones, but all of them. Maybe when childhood ends, you wake up, but that doesn’t mean that we are not allowed to dream again. I like to think of our phases in life as dreams; all of them are different, of course, but all of them are that: dreams.

To sum everything up, I consider that life stages are like dreams. I thought and felt for a long time that after childhood, all that we had were horrible things. Like living in a nightmare. But that is not the case, sometimes life can feel like a nightmare, but we still have the opportunity to dream, and to do that, sometimes we need to remember how to think as a child. We forget how to be creative and positive, and sometimes that is the key to being happy with our lives.