Who Did You Want to Be?
Let’s go back for a second. Before the career, before the undefined future became your prescribed present. Who did you imagine becoming before you became who you are now?
I think about that version of me now and again, but it’s strange how I see him. Like I’m watching old home movies, observing that kid from the outside. I can see him drawing doodles in the margins of homework sheets, hunched over the computer designing elaborate fake amusement parks, building worlds that made perfect sense to him, even if they made no sense to anyone else.
Maybe it’s because a lot of my memories actually are from home movies. My dad recorded everything, and I’ve seen myself at that age more often through his lens than through my own eyes. My lived experiences and my memories of watching them on tape blurred together at some point. But watching that kid, whether in my mind or on grainy video, there’s both a kinship I feel and a yearning to reach back through time and talk to him. Ask questions I can no longer answer about how he saw the world back then.
Sometimes I write for him now. Sometimes I think he’s still listening, waiting to see who I’ll become, wondering if I’ll remember what it felt like to build something just because it seemed impossible.