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ALL WRITING AND ARTWORK ARE THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF PSG LOPES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, 2018.
There once was a little girl from Saratoga who had dreams just like everyone else. Each dream she had never come true. With every dream this little girl had, it either got ruined, altered or became much too outlandish to ever possibly become true.
My dreams started young. I was very impressionable and everything I saw I wanted to become someday. I loved music and singing from a very early age. I loved all kinds of music and instruments and would’ve loved to play the piano or guitar or some other kind of musical instrument. I never did anything to nurture this dream of mine. My mind thought much too quick and I never developed the discipline to ever partake in anything as fancy as singing lessons or instrument lessons. My family’s finances were always very tight and we lived in a bad neighborhood growing up, so the opportunities were minimal to ever consider any such luxuries as singing and instrument lessons anyway.
As I got slightly older, I really enjoyed watching the winter Olympics. I loved watching the beautiful women glide gracefully on ice on those pristine rinks. I was always a cherubic young girl and now an adult, so that was never a very realistic dream. I used to wear sneakers and put crocheted booties over them and pretend to ice skate on the small linoleum surface in the kitchen of the cramped apartment where I grew up. While listening to Ace of Base as my performance music, I’d envision the crowds cheering me on. I often wondered what it would be like to have people be proud of me for accomplishing something so great.
Older still, I then evolved my dreams to become a little more grounded and realistic. One of my favorite teachers inspired me to want to become a teacher, myself. I wanted to be an English teacher. My parents found an old chalkboard that they refurbished for us and got a corkboard as a bulletin board and I remember crafting imaginary lessons, creating pretend rosters and holding pretend classes in my bedroom. I’d grade pretend papers, scold pretend children, which were usually my dolls or my childhood dog, Rio. My father was also a teacher. Due to our eventual strained relationship as I got older, I found teaching to be more and more undesirable.
One thing that I developed when I was about twelve years old, was my love of writing. I was always so very shy and it was often hard to articulate how I felt. My family was always so outspoken and overbearing and my words often got lost in the thunderclap of noise they’d create throughout the day. Writing became more than a passion, it became an escape. I’d write about everything that angered me, that I was afraid of, my hopes and dreams, things that I’d wish for desperately to come true. One central theme was to become thin and beautiful and marry a handsome man who would whisk me away from all that ailed me. I often found myself resorting to fantasy as a coping mechanism for how horribly I always felt. These feelings of worthlessness were deeply rooted from a very early age. I can’t remember one single day in my life where I can honestly say that I truly loved myself and that I deserved to be happy. It just wasn’t how my brain was built.
By the time I reached high school when everyone around me was coming up with possible career choices, I honestly couldn’t for the life of me think of anything that I could see myself being. My mother was a homemaker her whole married life, I had it ingrained in my mind that I was just going to be a homemaker too and get married and have a whole mess of kids. Well, my life was a whole mess of something alright. The first year of high school was in a different state from where I live now. It was a trades and technical high school and I had chosen to major in environmental science. I was a different person back then. I truly enjoyed the outdoors and nature and animals. I actually wanted to be a park ranger. I had finally solidified something that I’d want to do.
We moved the following year to the next state over and the new high school I went to did not have majors and was more matriculated to include all disciplines. I still clung onto the possibility that I could still find a college program where I could do the park ranger thing. I never really knew how the world worked and I didn’t realize all the steps and planning and money it took to truly follow the path of your dreams. I wanted to go away to college but neither my parents nor money allowed me the option. I was forced to attend the same college my sister went to and there were no real majors that I liked there and was forced to major in the only discipline I had any experience in—psychology. I took a psychology class in high school and really liked my teacher and decided to major in psychology. I had no desire to further pursue this as a master's or Ph.D. I didn’t want to be a psychologist or a therapist. I felt trapped into choosing something in a place where the options were so limited. After high school, I was briefly tempted to join the military and was being pursued by a military recruiter who nearly had me sign the paperwork. He had promised me that I would travel the world and get the funding I’d need to become the park ranger I had envisioned for myself. Again, familial obligations kept me from following through and I had totally closed the door to that path and pursued psychology in college.
I graduated college four years later coming nowhere closer to picking a career. My father would pester me about staying in college a little longer to get my teaching certificate, but I had disliked my father so much by then that the mere thought of becoming him left such a bitter taste in my mouth. In hindsight, he did have a point, but I would have rather died than allow him to say he was right and for me to actually listen to him. The job that I had kept throughout college went out of business so I realized it was getting serious and it was time to choose some sort of job so that I could start making some money. I decided to buckle down and swallowed my pride and became a substitute teacher. Little did I know that this choice would have devastating consequences because I never left. I have substitute taught on and off since I was 21 years old. I am almost 38 now. During that time, I tried my hardest to gain and hold teaching jobs, but I was either fired from them or I quit. I was never able to hold any other job other than substitute teaching. That was the only job that I’ve never been fired from, laid off from, or quit other than to pursue a temporary teaching spot.
It’s not like I hadn’t been productive otherwise during the years. I dabbled in getting a master's when I was 24 and took some classes at a different university, but that discipline didn’t suit me either so I never went back. In between teaching gigs, I decided to go back to school yet again when I was 27 and pursued my master's and Ph.D. in business administration. This period of about seven years was what I considered my Renaissance years. From being so broken in my mid-twenties, I finally found something that was mine and that I took to so naturally. I was making friends that weren’t teachers. I had separated myself from the gripping hold of my family and I was beginning to feel a semblance of independence and pride in myself. When I had finished my schooling, it was so anticlimactic. I can’t even explain what I was expecting. Not exactly in the sense of a ticker-tape parade or anything absurd of that nature. I was just expecting more. Since I was 21, I have applied approximately to 1,250 jobs and was only offered an interview around 40 times. I’ve interviewed for several positions ranging from education, retail, traditional businesses, hospitals, and such. I’ve used services as antiquated as monster.com to indeed to headhunters until the money slowly started dwindling like sand through my fingertips.
I was never chosen for any position outside of education. My resume was severely lacking and one tends to question why I spent fifteen years as a substitute teacher while I’m being interviewed. So, now, being nearly 38 years old, I find myself with a mortgage sized student loan debt that I may very well never be able to repay and no real career options. Out of all of this barrage of a mess that my life turned out to be, I sifted through everything that I’ve done and really reached down deep within myself and asked myself, “If you could do or be anything at the age you are now and can start all over what would you choose?” The constant thing that kept coming back to me is writing. Writing had always come naturally to me. I’ve always had something to say in writing even if in person I always appeared to be mute because I was always so bitterly shy.
After being laid off from the last teaching job I had in 2016, that was pretty much the straw that broke the camel’s back. That school year was the best year I had ever had. It started off rocky as most new jobs do, but by the end of the year I had the highest confidence I ever had in my life, my weight was finally down to a respectable level, and I was making the most money I had ever seen in my life. Getting laid off was devastating and to my solace, it was of no fault of my own. They just had no full-time openings available for the following school year and being low on the totem pole I was first off the chopping block. It was time to reinvent myself yet again. I decided to take the following year off and develop my own writing line, The Moonlit Goddess. I started off writing erotica shorts on Amazon. I did that for four months. I realized that that wasn’t the type of writing I was suited for. I didn’t like how I was being treated by potential readers and I also didn’t like the anonymity of it. I spent my whole life being muted and quieted. I didn’t want to remain quiet another second longer. I feel that writing is a true gift and it should be used to convey a positive message to the world. If I could help at least one person through my writing than I would feel that this whole venture had been worth it all.
My writing line now has expanded extensively since I started and I write just about everything from poetry, to fiction, to children’s books and even creating my own songs. So now I am slowly seeing one of the dreams I had growing up come into fruition. I had taken a hiatus due to the fact that my father developed dementia and required full-time care. 2018, for the most part, has been one of the worst years of my adult life. I have gained an immense amount of weight. My self-esteem has hit less than rock bottom. I have no desire to leave my home other than to run the occasional errand or if a family member needs me to drive them somewhere. I’m essentially a functioning agoraphobe.
For those of you who are familiar with my story, I met a lovely gentleman from Ireland that I’ve known for almost two years now. He has asked me to marry him and we had planned on me living with him in Ireland. I was meant to leave with him this past weekend, but I ended up not going. I had wanted so very much to go to Ireland this past weekend. But I let negativity get the best of me. I felt like I was abandoning my family. I kept seeing my sister crying in my head that I couldn’t shake. I saw all these things, but I never once saw what I was doing to myself by not going. All these people who I decided to stay for they aren’t even speaking to me much. I feel isolated and lonely and lost and I deeply regret not going. I wish that I wasn’t such a coward. I wish that I was the type of person who can just do things without all the overthinking and the tiring anxiety crippling me and making me doubt myself. I just couldn’t do it. I allowed my fears to get the best of me and I am ashamed of myself.
I know how hard it was to come up with that flight money being a lowly substitute teacher. I also recognize the kindness of my family who spent their own money and time on the cause as well. I wasted one of the potentially best opportunities of my life. I know that where I currently live I’m never going to be anything more than a substitute teacher who drives my family around to their appointments all day. What my fiance offered me was stability, home of my own, a chance to begin anew in a place where no one knew all of the silly mistakes I’ve made as an adult. I had a chance to forge a path that was ours and ours alone. I could stop living in my family’s shadow and finally become the person that I always wished that I could be. Another dream that I let escape me and for the life of me, I cannot forgive myself. This has been one of the worst weeks of my life. I feel like a loser. A nobody. A nothing. It sucks. I suck.
The best that I can do now is to continue on with my writing and keep producing work. Of all the dreams I have let go, I refuse to let this be one of them. No matter how low I feel, no matter who else I allow to hurt me, I will never allow anyone to take this dream from me. So write I shall. Stay tuned to more writing coming soon…
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