For three years I had kept myself from pen and paper. After realizing the end to a foolish dream, I took the liberty of throwing out a part of me I know I can never be. But as I walked past a row of books this afternoon and took notice of a collection titled “The Best of Youngblood,” I knew that I could not rest without killing off the strange unease that had grown within me. This is not a story of triumph or hope, but a story of frustrations, dead dreams and reality.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since high school. I liked writing assignments that required me to write mediocre stories or thoughts on current events, or even personal insights in life. Back then, I found it relatively easy to write than to talk, as I was a timid child. And so I buried myself in writing.
When my English teacher asked for essays on the literature she told us to read, I always obliged, quickly and gladly. I never cared about what I wrote, and always made it a point to make it long. I loved long explanations of simple things, to a point of excess and mediocrity. I didn’t care. By my junior year I was keeping a blog that I named “The Confessions of a Schizophrenic.” (It was made during the time of the movie “Confessions of a Shopaholic” and one of our health lessons on mental disorders, thus the title.) I was an optimist at that time. I wrote about the versatility of humans, and how we should appreciate life, love letters, love stories and what I thought was the hope of politics. I wrote everything I thought was right and real.
Looking back, I was sure 95 percent of what I said was wrong, naive and immature. I was also pretty sure of another thing: I was happiest when I put pen to paper. Despite all the wishful scrambling, I knew then that I was made to be a man sitting behind a wooden desk, with a lamplight that shone a dim yellow, holding a broken-tipped G-tech I can’t replace because I need to meet my deadline before the sun rises. Even now I can still imagine myself wearing my pyjamas (what I thought was the writer’s uniform) and scratching my beard with a hand full of pen marks. I thought that besides having a daughter and a simple wife, that was enough.
That’s what I thought, until I discovered that it wasn’t that simple. I needed to pick a college course. A lot of people take a course because that’s what they want to do. I proclaim this: That’s not always the case. My freedom as a high school student was limited to what reality proposed to me: the perspectives of my parents, the capabilities I possessed, the opportunities of a specific job. Oh, how I wanted to study philosophy or psychology or sociology. They wrote like idiots and made a living from observations. Oh, how I wanted that life! But no, my mom said that most of the time they did not earn much (if offensive, I apologize), and that the ideal course for me was engineering (for my family, at least). I knew math fairly and it earns a great deal of money. Take it, that’s what the real world needs.
I told this story to a lot of people and all they said was: Why didn’t you fight for what you loved? In my head I had only one answer: What you love doesn’t always work out. People thought that I should have packed my bags and ran to my dreams, like the stars on Broadway, and escaped being trapped in a forced life. But no, reality isn’t a movie or a success story. I, and probably the vast majority of students my age, needed to make a decision between love and life. Unfortunately, I decided to go with life.
The man wearing pyjamas and holding a broken pen died that day, or so I thought.
In the middle of my first year in college I deleted my prized blog, however much it cost me and my pride as a quasiwriter. With it went the dreams—pondering under the trees, writing in secret journals and getting published. Gone. I had to move on.
With this death came my frustration with life. The world I knew fed me the dreams that I had clung to. It taught me that I could be anyone I wanted. (When I was a child, the promise of being a scientist seemed so real.) The world I knew taught me of ordeals and villains and witches, and that they would all go away if I fought for my dream hard enough. The world I knew granted wishes. Too bad it never taught me reality.
Dreams are for the unlucky, I concluded back then. My environment created aspirations and dreams. There were TV stories of people who had the guts and power to realize their dreams. For a while, those stories in 30-minute segments seemed possible—of shoe makers who became mall builders, tire sellers who became millionaires, undergraduates who became software champions. Dreams seemed eternally within reach.
But we didn’t see the stories of those who failed, of those who fell in the mud and never got up, of those who heaved but were never gratified.
With all these observations, I can confidently say that expectations are good for a few but a curse for most. Most of the people end up in the middle, a part of what we call the ordinary and the normal. But they live behind their dreams of grandeur and in frustration, for the sake of the few who achieved success and lived their dreams. We can be likened to blind kids walking through a maze. As much as we’d like to move straight, the restrictions bind us to follow the path and scramble for the exit. Some can break through walls and see through hearing. But not everyone.
These thoughts filled my reality until the moment I walked past “The Best of Youngblood.” I had always wanted to be published, but threw that dream away in college. But as I read the articles in the collection I became sure of one thing: The writer in pyjamas has not died. The man I want to be is eternal.
I still believe that dreams are for the unlucky, that I will stay in the sidelines and get nothing. But I know that the person I desired to be, the writer with a broken pen—he’s my creation! When I was writing for the first time, society didn’t provide me the dream, I dreamed it for myself. He’s the unkillable side of me that will persevere through all the realities I experience. He owns my heart, and hearts are unconquerable.
I am left with one conclusion: Society is the killer of dreams and I’m their defender. They got me. I can never be a professional writer but that doesn’t mean I should kill off the man who wants to be one. No, he will live on to tell the world to suck it up. I’m the mediocre engineer who dreams of pens for fun. The least I can do is not to give the world the satisfaction that I lost.
If doing this puts me in the ordinary, then so be it. They say the people who don’t hold on to dreams fade away in the background. My legends will remain unwritten, my grand portraits undrawn. No matter. This is the reality I have to accept.
I will remain with the unsung but I will keep singing my songs.
Kyle Geroche, 18, is in his third year studying electronic communications engineering at the University of Santo Tomas.