If you’re anything like I was for a decent amount of my life, you would roll your eyes when a teacher said “follow your dreams” or when your parents told you that “you can have anything if you work hard enough for it.” These cliches have been drilled into our minds since we knew what the words simply meant. I have been asked an uncountable number of times why I major in dietetics and not in music in college. My answer-- “I need a backup plan.” This seems like a suitable answer. But it is not. We live in a world full of backup plans. A world full of dreamers, not doers. So many individuals let their backup plans become primary and their dreams become a long lost childhood fantasy, put on the back burner of life.

I grew up watching my dad pack up his pickup truck with glamorous equipment and a sparkly, purple drum set on Friday nights. I thought my Dad was a rockstar because who else would own purple sparkly drums? Later, I found out that he and his band, Krisis, just played locally at festivals and bars, but he was still a rockstar to me.

When I was 4 years old, I did a preschool project saying that when I grew up, I wanted to be a singer. I started singing when I began to talk, much to my family’s pleasure in our relatively small house compared to my voice. I “wrote songs” beginning at age seven about peas falling off of my plate and into my dog, Cooper’s, food dish. If you asked me to sing it today, I would deny that I even remembered writing it, but, everyone remembers the first song they ever write--proud or not. At age 9, I wrote a piano piece and played it at my recital. At this point, I was still a back-of-the- car singer and bedroom songwriter.

I continued singing and writing music with voice and piano and I began playing my original music for my family. They urged me to play it out loud to others to hear but I was too scared that people would judge me. When I was fifteen, I went on a mission trip with my church through a program called U.M. Army. Tradition was that the night before leaving camp, there was a talent show. I sat down at the piano and played for the first time in front of a crowd, and I fell in love. I got a Hummingbird guitar for my 16th birthday and spent the summer learning how to play it by watching and playing along to a lifetime's worth of YouTube Tutorial Videos. I began entering singing and songwriting contests, singing in my church choir, playing at festivals, and I even became the lead singer of a band,Young Kangaroo Republic (Yeah, I know…”Inventive” name…) and we opened for Pete Seeger. I was living my dream until I had to go to college.

“College isn’t for everyone” I would hear daily. “It’s okay if you want to work at Hannafords for the rest of your life” my mom would tease. I always loved living a healthy lifestyle--working out six days a week and making sure my diet was healthy. So, if I wasn’t going to study music, naturally I chose dietetics (or nutrition). I got to school and my guitar sat under my bed for the entire first semester while I did my chemistry post lab reports and I learned the parts of the brain for my psychology class that I couldn’t seem to keep my eyes opened during. My life was school, working out, and sleep. Something that I once had so much passion for was just suddenly gone.

I came home for winter break and I had time to sing and write music again. I played some gigs and felt that love for music that I felt once before. I created Instagram and Facebook pages dedicated to my music and learned to incorporate music into my life at school at SUNY Oneonta. I did some researching and found local open mics, performance venues, and even a school club devoted to songwriting. I met people with my same love for music who studied everything from pre-med to teaching. We were chasing our dreams while having a backup plan--the right way.

I am still a full-time dietetics student, but I am also chasing my dreams. I have over 11,000 followers on social media for my music, I have been featured in interviews and radio shows, I have music on iTunes, I play out at least twice a week, and country music hall of fame musician, Jim Vest, invited me to Nashville to produce my Debut Album. This didn’t just happen overnight, this happened because for once in my life, I put my dreams before reality and decided not to waste my life worrying about what people will think of me as a New Yorker who doubles as a country musician. This all happened in SIX MONTHS, so imagine what a lifetime of acting could bring.

Don’t let your backup plans become primary because that’s just a one-way ticket to giving up. Be careless, be

fearless, be a dreamer AND a doer, but most of all, be you and don’t settle for a backup plan--because if someone is going to make your dreams come true, it is you.