When I say stop, you go. When I say go you’ll know that our relationship is over, and I can’t take it anymore.
A statement.
A proclamation, if you will.
But above all else? A chorus.
To a song that I wrote, produced, and sang lead on for a girl group that I founded as a fifth grader.
Though the titles of both that song and our girl group have since been archived into the recesses of my 27-year-old memory, that chorus serves as both an intangible relic of my prepubescent years and a testament to my inherent creativity. A creativity that I so easily basked in with no regard of professionalism nor practicality.
Professionalism and practicality?
Psh, the only pair of “p” words that I reserved thought for was playing and pretending. Rushing home from school to produce on my keyboard was my jam. Hopping on a three-way call with my girls to compose lyrics was my jam. Belting my eleven-year-old-non-heartbroken heart out as a songstress was my jam.
And in each of those instances, I was playing and pretending.
In my mind, “playing” meant “having fun.”
Dancing my fingers across my keyboard was fun. Scribbling lyrics in my composition notebook was fun. Singing until I became hoarse was fun. And with the first Cheetah Girls movie having debuted just two years prior, I was pretending to be Galleria Garibaldi — which was also fun.
It was all fun, but it was all a collective act of play.
Though my fifth-grade mind couldn’t comprehend the semantics of “professionalism” and “practicality,” the pragmatics of each were indoctrinated into me year after year in the form of career day. As the veterinarians, firefighters, scientists, and lawyers cycled through the classroom, I understood that these were real jobs held by real people.
These were professionals with practical careers.
No songstresses. No composers. No producers.
Just the same white coats and red hoses displayed on a carousel of indoctrination and misrepresentation.
Career day was marketed as an opportunity for children to see real careers. Granting us access to real careers meant granting us access to the real world, and if this real world was devoid of songstresses, composers, and producers, what did that say about the world that I had curated in my bedroom?
If its value was confined to my bedroom, then so would be my interest in it. But as that bedroom morphed into a homework hub fraught with math books, science projects, and history lessons, my kindling interest in all things creative was extinguished by all things practical.
Keystrokes across my keyboard were no match for keystrokes across my calculator. Pen strokes to craft sassy songs were no match for the pen strokes of my highlighted textbooks.
Calculators and textbooks were practical. Keyboards and songs were not.
And yet, sometimes I think.
Of how differently my life may have been had my prepubescent passion been preserved and not polluted. Nurtured and not neglected. Championed and not chastened.
But above all else, I wonder...
What if?
What if instead of emphasizing professionalism and practicality, career day emphasized passion and purpose? If instead of deferring dreams and deterring passions, they defended and endorsed them?
Maybe then little kids would learn that their acts of play and instances of pretend are laced with passion and purpose. And that said passionate and purposeful pretending and playing are enough to birth a career that is both professional and practical.
A songstress.
A composer.
A producer.
Three professions that 27-year-old me acknowledges as what could have been, all because an 11-year-old me was led to believe they could never be.
Go figure.