It’s funny how we fantasise about a certain reality, only for us to finally meet up with it and it plays out almost completely different from the way we pictured it in our minds. As a kid I’ve always had expectations and aspirations of how my life would go when I attain the era of adulthood. But in most cases the way it turns out is that after you make plans for your life for the future, on reaching the future it go on to make plans for your life, and the unfunny part is when it is in contrast with your initial plans.
If anyone had told me back then that my life would be the way it is now I wouldn’t have believed. I’ve had a couple of aspirations for my life when I was much younger. I felt like as one makes it to the adult stage life would just automatically fix itself up the way you imagine it. When I see most people around me who were adults and how well their lives seemed to be I just felt like all I had to do was grow up and then “boom” mine would take the same shape. But turns out that’s not how life goes.
As a kid, when I projected myself into the future around the age of 18 I saw myself already living the life. At that age I saw the age “18” as a very big age. The age where life begins. The age where one becomes all wise and knowing. The age you are expected to start living your dream life. I made a really big deal out of it. Probably because of the way the society attached a lot of things to that age; like not being able to have your license and drive until you turn 18, not allowed to drink beer until you turn 18, or go to a kind of party or club except you’re 18 and above, and so on. It made the age “18” seem like some kind of golden age.
My major dream as a kid I hoped to play out in my life when I grow up was to be a superstar. When I see mainstream artistes in their music videos, interviews, receiving Grammy awards so on I would visualise myself doing all those things. I’ve always dreamed of living that “celebrity lifestyle.” Making it early like Justin Bieber, being on the cover of entertainment magazines, standing in front of dozens of people lined up waiting to get an autograph from me, like life was just taking note of all this and in no distant time it would deliver them all to me.
Back then my imagination had no boundaries. It was as if just because I wish and hope for it then I would have it fall on my laps. I didn’t know that dreaming was just one steps out of the dozen of steps left to take.
And when I see all those people I admired on TV, magazines, and online they make it look it’s not really much of a big deal, like life gives us an easy route. I think one of the major reasons for this was because of how comfortable life was for us while we were growing up. How we needed to worry about little or nothing because our parents had us covered. What we tended to worry about mostly was keeping our grades up. But whether we performed excellently in school or not would not hold our parents back from giving meeting our needs because that was their responsibility regardless.
It even becomes more crazy when you’re the type of kid who had life all rosy from the start but somewhere along the line the tables turned the other way. That’s my story. At first life for me was like that of a young prince, that was what made me think that life would continue to remain like or even get a lot better. But one of the realities I got to discover about life is that things can turn around at any second; either the good way or the bad way.
But there I was thinking that life can only get better, literally. I thought by now I’d be navigating from country to country internationally, but I have never even seen any African country apart from the one I was born in. I thought I would have even married by now and maybe had a kid or two, fast forward to today I’m not even in a relationship to start with, talk more of being married and having kids.
But when life begins to get real you begin to find it hard to dream and hope for things, and even if you manage to do your imagination world gradually begins to shrink and becomes more of a confined space compared to how great and limitless it was when you were a kid. Instead of seeing ourselves as being optimistic and hopeful we begin to see ourselves as being delusional and illogical. We become more cautious of how we think and certain actions to take because we are scared of it falling through and what people may say or feel about us.
The few years I’ve spent on this earth I’ve come to realise that life would not always turn out the way we thought it would. At times it’ll turn out to be a “what you ordered versus what you got” scenario. But it does not necessarily mean that is the end of the road. Sometimes it could just be that the our expected timing is different from the timing the universe has set for us. And if that’s the case nothing we do would be able to reset the destined time it was meant to happen.
Another thing i learned from it is that it could just be that that life we had all mapped out was never meant to happen. Now this is a hard truth that a lot of people might find hard to accept. But that’s just the truth. At that age when we are fantasying about that dream life it may seem all perfect and make us think like we know what we want, but then things may take a different direction. At first we may be unhappy about it, but in due time we would may end up being appreciative for how life eventually turned out to be and more grateful that life didn’t give us what we hoped for at first.
In everything, we should remain optimistic and not let the fire die down regardless of how things seem to be at the moment. We also grateful at every level we find ourselves. The thing with growth or progress at times is that it may not be obvious at first, but when we begin to look back at our lives over the past years that is when we begin to realize how far we have gone that we didn’t notice.
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