I remember when I was eight years old. I wasn’t as carefree as the average eight-year-old, but I dreamed just as big. I wanted to be a veterinarian, and with wide-eyed wonder I watched shows on Animal Planet like “Animal Cops: Houston.” I remember declaring often to anyone who would listen how I was going to save so many lives and change the face of medicine. I clung to that dream like a security blanket for so many years, upturning every rock and flagstone to find the path to the most illustrious career. I was a very curious child, so full of promise and with so many wants for my life. I truly believed that I was going to see my own name stitched onto the face of a clean white lab coat, with the initials DVM printed right beside it -- Doctor of Veterinary Medicine.

Especially proud of my aspirations was my dad. I’m sure there was a multitude of reasons for his pride, but there were three specific ones that I’m duly aware of. First and foremost, he was proud that I was going to live up to my potential. Sometimes parents think their children are superheroes like Catwoman or Spiderman and are overjoyed when they catch them wearing a cape and looking into the mirror. My dad was certain he had done this in my case. It made him feel like he had done at least one correct thing in the tumultuous path of parenting.

The second reason for my dad’s pride is something he never liked to talk about, and one I am only going to gloss over this time (perhaps I will touch upon it at a later date?). You see, my father was a chef. He was quite gifted and he was proud of himself for following his dreams. He always resented his parents for not allowing him to fulfill his academic aspirations, and he found a home in culinary arts. Unfortunately, life wasn’t always so easy for him. He was often dealt a bad hand and was not always skilled at making the best of it. He became angry, resentful, bitter. He never wanted this life for himself, and especially not for his children, and so he feared every day that my sisters and I would choose an unstable career like he did. Hearing me say I wanted to be a doctor made him sigh with relief.

The third reason is as simple as they come: bragging rights. People love to know they’ve done a good job, and having children is no exception. My dad wanted to be able to say that his children beat the odds and were successful. He wanted us to claw our way back from the impoverished background we came from, humbled and successful. It was his dream as well as it was ours, so imagine my pain when I had to come clean to my dad about what I really wanted for my life. I realized it at sixteen, and let me tell you, the truth fucking hurt. To realize that 8-year-old me was wrong about how my life was supposed to turn out was heartbreaking. It felt like I was looking myself in the face and telling that young, fragile heart that Santa Claus wasn’t real. And believe me, my dad took it a lot harder than I did.

I took a very long time to come to terms with it. I suppose this dream needed a meditation period or something. I lied to myself about it for years because I just couldn’t bring myself to tell my dad -- or myself -- the truth. How do you? How do you tell the people who are literally counting on you that you’re going to risk it all and potentially lose everything? I was (and still am) a gambler in this respect. I’m risking losing all that my dad and I had hoped for me -- job stability, a larger-than-life salary, a comfortable life. And what for? Because people told me I was really good at using words to express myself? Preposterous.

Preposterous, and yet … true. I was risking it all. Everything I had ever dreamt for myself was being put on the line, and had the potential to be lost. I was doing this with that same wide-eyed wonder I had at eight years old, and I was doing it because I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be known as someone with a colorful mind and a vast imagination, creating new and exciting things out of the banal and tangible things I was given to work with. I wanted to be known as someone who could create a fantasy world out of an anthill or turn a baby into a princess, or finally get the man of my dreams in exactly the way I had wanted to. I wanted to be someone’s lifeline.

Growing up, I didn’t have many friends and I was dismissed a lot when I spoke. Being a writer would be different, I was certain of it. I wanted people to listen to me intently, hanging on to my every word as it slipped off my lips. I wanted to be someone. I did not want to be something. I did not want to be a law firm’s codpiece, just something they used to screw people. I did not want to be the figurehead of a large corporation or glued to beakers and test tubes. Independently, I wanted to be someone. I wanted to prove to everyone that I needed no one to make me feel like I was someone. Despite what they all thought, I did not need validation or love from anyone. I could take care of myself. The rest was just gravy. Only now, that’s something I have to prove.

I’m just sorry now, that my dreams aren’t “practical.” It’s almost as though a child who aspires to be a surgeon or a lawyer is guaranteed to be a billionaire. This obviously isn’t true, but it seems to be the feeling these days. The feeling that made artists afraid to be. Some of them never even realize that they are brilliant and are exceptional in the art world until much later because they were taught that art is a hobby and nothing more. They were taught that any other thought was treasonous to intellect and academia.

Given this, it’s no surprise that I was afraid to admit to my family and myself that I wanted to join the community of freethinkers. I wanted to be an artist, too, because I can’t for the life of me silence my heart long enough to want a “regular” job. I don’t know that I ever will be able to, and I don’t know that I even want to do that. I just hate that we now live in a world where artists are afraid to be themselves and are afraid to want for themselves. How do you expect talent to flourish in an environment that is antagonistic to anomaly? We need creative people. We demand creative people in a world that do little to nurture and instead tries to beat down and kill what is different.

This is where artists are different from narrow-minded intellectuals. They kill what is different we preserve it. We nurture and encourage it to grow because we realize that the unique and different is what makes the world push and contrive. It is what makes people strive to change. We need to stop breaking young minds down and polishing them to be something they don’t want to be. We cannot continue to send the message to little girls and boys that art is nothing but a hobby and that time is better spent crunching numbers in arithmetic class or reading great American classics. Who do you think is writing these great American classics? Young minds, too resilient to listen to antagonistic thought. Young minds like mine.

I am an artist, and I will be damned if there will ever be a day I apologize for wanting to be who I am, and follow my dreams just like every other kid. I can’t help that my dreams aren’t “practical,” but in my defense there’s a reason they’re dreams and not realities. They’re meant to be larger than life. The moon is large, but it still needs its stars.