My friend Molly and I played Barbies and other make believe games until at least 8th grade.
In reality, mass amounts of my childhood were spent playing with baby dolls, dollhouses, Barbies, or making up extremely detailed soap opera-esque characters.
Either I played a lot of house, I was a drama queen...or both.
Want to know a secret?
I still like to play house.
Don't pretend like you don't do it.
When did playing house and trying out different roles switch from normal to child's play?
When did we decide that adults can't change who they are?
In one of my classes this year, we spend quite a bit of time in small "family" groups. As we were assigned groups, we were also given a sheet to fill out, assigning family roles, outlining demographics and creating the fabric of our small family unit. The families were created to act out different conflicts and experiment with various forms of communication, to play roles, and understand other perspectives.
But to be honest, I am mostly just excited to get to play house for class credit.
I'm still learning how to interact with people, see from diverse viewpoints and discover my own self, and playing house is a perfect way to try on other personalities and be experimental about my interactions with little to no consequence.
I get to pretend to be someone else, play with my life and just see what happens.
Because don't we all want to try on other personalities? Aren't we all fascinated with lives outside of our own lives? Deny it all you want, but we live in a world submerged with memoirs, movies "based on a true story," and documentaries that tell me otherwise.
We all want to tell our story, hoping someone will understand.
And we all want to hear about others, imagining our lives in another way.
Maybe it's bad, maybe we should be more content with where we were put and which circumstances surround us. But how would the world continue to spin without waves of change?
Many of us weren't born into a strict, oppressive caste system with the hope of incarnation to draw us to a better life. We have choices instead.
We have power.
We have power over our lives.
Should we have a basic idea of who we are, what we believe, and how we act?
Probably.
But what happens if we begin to shift parts of this self-perception in safe atmospheres?
Life isn't a one shot deal, we get chances to try, learn, fall down, and get up to try again, because being wrong and making a mistake isn't failing at life.
As my third-grade teacher said, "It's okay to try and fail and try and fail again, but it's not okay to try and fail and fail to try again."
So keep dreaming, keep training, keep playing house and finding your role. You aren't going to change anything without changing something. So step out and open yourself for morphing, knowing you can always fall back into the safety net you've already created behind you.
Who said we have to stop playing make believe?
