My Reflection

As a little girl I wanted to be a ballerina/teacher/surgeon. It wasn’t that at one time or another during my childhood I wanted to be one or another of the aforementioned, I literally wanted to be all three all at once. I walked on the tips of my toes, so being a ballerina was an obvious career choice. I loved to be the teacher when my siblings and I played school, so of course I was destined to teach the masses, and for some odd reason, which is *not* still true today, I enjoyed watching surgery shows on TV (this was Puerto Rico and I have no idea why they showed surgeries on TV), hence the surgeon.

With the possible exception of teaching, I think that my choices were random and only slightly related to anything I was passionately interested in at the time (why wasn’t  being Wonder Woman a career choice?) They were more just possibilities that existed, and therefore, open to me. I don’t think that at any point in my childhood the thought “you can’t be everything or even just anything you want” ever entered my mind, and when I looked in the mirror I only saw beauty and endless possibilities in my reflection

Then a little thing called life happened and with it came the naysayers who one by one touched my reflection and left it smudged with fingerprints of their own doubts and their own fears. I could no longer see myself clearly and saw no option but to slowly accept the distorted reflection before me. The memories of the beauty and endless possibilities I had long ago seen reflected were all but faded, tucked away neatly in the corners of my mind waiting to be recalled.

But as memories are apt to be impatient, they conjure themselves unexpectedly, somehow knowing when we most need them. The memory of the naive child I was, slowly returned, and spent the last five years wiping away the years of smudges of fear upon smudges of doubt that others, and even I, had left behind. Slowly I began to see my reflection again and saw in my grown up eyes the faint image of the child who believed that she could be everything and anything, and knew then that though that child was gone, her belief remained. So though I no longer want to be a ballerina/teacher/surgeon I want to belief that I could.