Monday, March 3, 2014

My Burden

I love Wednesdays. I go to my favorite classes, when I get home I usually don't do anything, I go to dance class and goof around for a good hour and then I come home and usually start writing these. However, its past midnight and I know nothing of what i am about to write. This week we are writing about 5+ things we "carry" everyday; something physical, an aspiration, a strong relationship, our personality and our memories.
Physical
What do I carry physically? The ONE thing that I feel naked and lonely without is a pair or earrings. Seriously, the amount of days I have gone without wearing any can be counted on one hand and still have fingers left over. I was born at 5:32 pm, and by 5:35 pm I had a very cute pair of gold studs, provided by my grandmother, in my ears. You could say that I was born with earrings on. Which up until I was 10 I truly believed! (My sister was born here in the U.S and she didn't have earrings so I freaked out I honestly believed they had mixed up the babies- the worst part is that I was disappointed in the newborn for not having earrings.) Another reason that NEVER leaving my house without earrings became more than a habit was that since I was a 2 year old being raised in Venezuela the whole conversation about "girls wear earrings and boys don't" got super installed in my head! In my class only the girls had earrings- yes ALL of them- and that's how we associated gender. One time I visited my cousin here in the U.S and she wasn't wearing earrings and straightforward 6/7 year old me walked up to my mom and asked if she was a girl or a boy...(clearly she was a girl.) Also, as a baby, my mom would put bows and change my earrings all the time and I NEVER took my earrings out, but the bows were off of me almost immediately...
There it is, I carry my earrings.

 
 
Dream/Goal/Aspiration

Goals and dreams and all that stuff are funny to me. For me they have always changed. For a really long time I wanted to be a flight attendant, for a really long time I wanted to be a vet, an actress, an artist, an engineer, a farmer, a racehorse trainer, you get the point. Things change, currently I want to do something in the filmmaking field, when people ask, I say film director to cut the whole explanation. But even then I'm not sure, it takes so much work and if there's anything that scares me more than not having a plan is limiting myself to only my plan. Like I said, things change. And then there are the goals that don't drive you. I mean, the ONLY universities I EVER wanted to go to were Rice and Harvard. CLEARLY NOT THE CASE ANYMORE. I have always had that pressure of wanting to go there but why didn't that pressure drive me to work harder academically? Or why was I never passionate enough about them to actually make my "dream" a reality? I honestly don't know. My bucket list has over 200 entries, and they are all different and some may not happen because I have changed my mind about that certain "phase of dreaming" and created new entries. Yet I cant seem to cross out the ones that "I'm not feeling"? Why?  Why do some dreams go wrong and others nag at you forever? I don't know... and that scares me, now knowing what's going to work what's a failure and what floats. I also really want to work at Disney somehow, maybe at the studio, maybe at the park, maybe even everything... i don't know. So, to answer the question as straightforward as possible for the current me- The dream that drives me the most right now is to get into Full Sail University and travel the world to make documentaries and movies and ahhh.... I get so nervous thinking about it. I cant say that it is what has driven me my whole life or what will continue to drive me until I accomplish it. My dad always says that happy is the best thing you can be and if that's the dream that makes me happy, even if it may be temporal (hopefully not, I like this one) then so be it.
I carry a dream to go to Full Sail and study filmmaking.


 


Relationship
Who is the person that never leaves my mind? My role model? The person that I do everything for, that inspires me to be a better version of myself? It's me. Well, little me. I was always a very ponderous child, I spent 100% of my time thinking of things, imagining, talking to myself, giving myself advice, for a long time I was my own bestfriend. I knew myself better than anyone. Of course, if anyone had asked me this question before 2012, the answer would have been my grandparents, all 4 of them. But something happened during the summer of 2012, I cut ties with my childhood. At that moment, sitting in the back seat of my moms car while on the Florida turnpike, I realized I wasn't the same person. Most of the things I thought, liked, and believed... all different.From that moment on, I have been trying to honor my childhood self in some way. I tend to catch myself drifting out and immediately start remembering things I would think of as a child, and those thoughts inspire me to be better. I pick up a book I used to read when I was younger and I enjoy getting the same feelings from it now as I did back then. Some things I do have to force myself to remember or I just don't and that's when I allow myself to "create" current-Vicky's opinion and its hard and I get sad that I don't remember, but it is what it is. In other words, when I realized that I had no traces of my childhood personality left, I decided to get them back and honor them somehow because I owe everything I am today to that little girl that thought that if you didn't wear earrings you were a boy. It is sort of that whole idea of "don't forget where you're from," There is a certain feeling that i can NEVER get rid of, it haunts me constantly and I respect it. That feeling is Nostalgia.
I carry my childhood self.


 
Personality
As previously stated, I change a lot. Lately the last year and half has been for the most part good for me but its also been confusing as to "who am I?" I don't know. How do i describe myself if I've never been funny, or  charismatic, or stubborn? I've always been independent and positive i suppose. Im always able to see the bright side of things and be by myself. I don't like problematic situations i don't like being rude and i respect my elders. I am a very  "by the book" person but i [think] am creative too. I don't get embarrassed easily, at all, which is a plus since i tend to be outgoing. I am very detail-oriented but at the same time i wont let things that are out of my control bother me. I am extremely close to my family i rather spend time with them over anything. I am open minded and tolerant, i don't like to judge people or other things (music, books, etc) too quickly. Im passionate about things i REALLY like- videos, history, dance, anything Disney. I'm sarcastic and picky, organized and shy, caring and happy.
I carry a positive outlook, passion and respect.


 
Memories
I have a very vivid memory, i remember a lot of random things from every moment in my life. For instance, i remember my first day of school in 1999, we played in the big glass room with giant foam blocks. I remember that when i was in 1st grade by mom would walk our dogs by my school everyday at lunch. I remember sitting in a car for endless hours, driving by the beach, getting new shoes. All random memories that hold some sort of value to me; whether it be sentimental or just because i cant get it out of my head. One of my favorite memories is going to the race track with my grandfather. We would wake up at 5 in the morning and we would go down and eat cheese empanadas and then watch all of his horses race (I named all of the ones born during my childhood- Baby Bop, Noche de Mayo (Night in May) and Fulvio). This one time, the jockey riding Baby Bop brought her over to us and in my head i said "This is it, I am going to be a jockey, i have to start training" and when he got off the horse he was about a foot taller than me... dream crushed. Needless to say i cried on the way home. At that moment in time i realized that you CAN'T do anything, that the whole idea of my parents saying "you can do anything you want to do" wasn't true, there are certain limitations; for me, it was my height- something i cannot control. Another memory that has a really big impact on my life is the way i got taught how to read. Since i was the first grandchild, niece, daughter, cousin everyone super spoiled me and i was always getting toys. My parents told me that i had to read the instructions before being able to use it or it would not work. I learned to read basically immediately. It hit me when i was 8 and my cousin and i were playing with his new toy. I was reading the instructions outloud and he asked me why. I said "because the toy won't work unless..." bam, it hit me harder than the bus that hit Regina George, i had been bamboozled into reading useless manuals. This taught me 3 things 1) to read and 2) that my parents lie to me so i could either believe anything i have ever heard from them or pick at it until i separated the truth from the lies 3) to follow directions. The last memory that i will share that has a big influence on me is from when i moved here. Moving here really gave me a perception of the world. Before that i though Boston was a state, Miami was a country, Antarctica was half of the globe and China was an island. I was so excited i forgot EVERYTHING i knew. I was so scared i didn't like speaking English, i sounded ugly. I missed my dogs and my house and my pool and the fact that i was getting paler and paler everyday made me think that i was becoming a "gringa." But my sister was even more scared, and as her big sister it was my job to help her feel at home- our new home. That month, September of 2005, i grew up.
I carry that day at the race track, all the manuals of every toy i ever had and the weight of my sister's fright.

 
 
In the end, we all carry things. They make us who we are. They create a present us, a future us and a past us. If it weren't for our memories, our goals, or even our physical appearance we wouldn't be ourselves.