“I feel like quitting school and becoming a kidz bop star."
No, this is not me quoting myself, although this is surely something my second grade self would say. But rather a tweet from the "I feel like" Twitter account. All of their tweets are entertaining and sometimes relatable, but this particular one hit home, and maybe that's because one of the only things my elementary school self wanted was to sing on a Kidz Bop CD.
Now that we're in college, everyone is so caught up in their future. "What am I doing this summer?" "Will I have an internship?" "Where will I go after college?" "What kind of job will I actually end up with?" "Will I even have a job?" You get the picture. I admit that these are questions I ponder myself 90 percent of the time. But this tweet made me step back for a minute and remember everything before college, even before high school. There are so many difficult moments in college when we just don't want to try anymore and we want to go back to the way things were when we were younger. Life was carefree and simple, although at the time the smallest of battles seemed like the only thing going on in the whole world, which I can now consider as a blessing in disguise.
Elementary school revolved around the best snack at lunch time, playing with your friends during recess and hiding from your crush during school (even though the conversations at sleepovers would solely revolve around you and your friends' new crushes of the week). Homework was not even a real thing, bad outfits didn't exist (a.k.a. no one judged what you wore back then because what 7-year-old actually knew what “cool" was) and you didn't have to have your life together because your parents did all of that for you. You were clueless to everything going on in the world around you and the only things that mattered were playdates and if you were eating mac-n-cheese for dinner.
My aspirations as a young child were endless, and although slightly unrealistic, my dreams still seemed reachable. Maybe I could actually become one of the Kidz Bop singers; I had the chokers and butterfly clips to pull off the signature look. Or maybe one day I would fulfill the ultimate goal of being on "All That" (and maybe this unfulfilled dream is the reason I now wish I could be on the more adult version -- SNL). And hopefully one day I would end up on Broadway. My childhood best friend and I decided we would live in an apartment in New York City and be just like Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, two of our biggest role models -- aside from Hilary Duff of course -- because it seemed like they had it all.
In elementary school we wished our childhood away. We dreamt of college days when we would no longer live at home and what it would be like to have a real job and be a real grown-up. We no longer wanted to be kids, we just wanted to be adults.
And now we're in college and we've come to the point where we could live in a New York City apartment with our best friend and we can actually try to get jobs that fulfill our dreams. We are on our own and we are the adults we couldn't wait to be 13 years ago. As amazing as it is to be independent and living life in the real world, it would sometimes be nice to go back to the simpler days.
We are constantly worrying about what is going to happen next and where our lives are going, but maybe our adult lives can be simpler, like they were in elementary school. I can't lie and say we shouldn't plan for or worry about the future or never think about what is going to happen next, but maybe if we take life day-by-day and we live in the moment, adult life can be just as simple. Our elementary school selves enjoyed all that life had to offer, and as adults we should still live our lives that same way.
I may not be able to be a Kidz Bop singer anymore or the leading star on "All That," but I can still dream of quitting college and going back to the elementary school glory days. Now there are other dreams I can aspire to achieve and if I look at them with the simple mind of my 7-year-old self, maybe I can be a little more hopeful and a little more confident that I can meet these goals.
Of course these tweets are made in jest, but I can not help but agree with this one as well:
