When we were younger, the adults in our life often give us toys that are supposed to remind us of how they want us to be when we grow up. Uncle Firefighter gave us a toy fire truck for our birthday. Aunt Nurse gave us a toy stethoscope for Christmas. Cousin Pilot gave us a remote controlled airplane.
These toys may not encompass the essence of the real thing. No wonder, we don’t get to become the firefighters, nurses and aviators when we grow up which easily becomes the subject of their dismay. They should have realized that from the start. You don’t get to become a pilot just because you are exposed to toy airplanes.
It’s like wanting to fly and completely forgetting about your fear of heights. Now that you’re old enough, you have to choose your own path, whether you like it or not. You get back to the representations of the dreams you thought you had and get disillusioned by the fact that those dreams don’t seem to elicit the same reaction from you now. Instead, all you are left with are disappointments and frustrations. All that because you think that you have ever dreamt at all when in fact, it was their dreams you’ve been trying to actualize all along.
What you do then is to try and go your own way. You try out every college interview, wearing your best shirt and a pair of silver cufflinks because they say that presentation is more than enough. At least, in that sense, they were right. Because when you’ve worn your favorite animal cufflinks in a business school interview, they didn’t imagine you wearing anything better.
So you try the aviation school hoping that the little you know about planes will do you good. But truth is, what got you are those Airplane Jet Pilot Aviator Cufflinks on your sleeves.
And then you’ll realize that reality is no longer important. It’s merely a system of representation after all.
