Personal Narrative Essay

            Back in 2011, I graduated from elementary school, and as a naïve 11-year old, I had big aspirations for myself. Such aspirations were being a part-time engineer and being a filthy-rich business man who somehow managed to tour as a musician and be world-famous. Well, none of this has happened yet, but one of the things that was present in my thoughts was that I wanted to leave the comfort of my own country.

            This was something very easy for me as a child to say. I did not care about the money involved in traveling abroad, the studying opportunities, the possibility of culture shock, home-sickness, or any other factor. I just knew that I wanted to do something different than the rest of my family, and moving to another country seemed like way to do it.

            After my summer vacations in 2011, my parents told me that there was an international school in town that provided study-abroad opportunities. After hours of begging, my parents finally agreed to let me go to that school. For me, this was my first step towards that nebulous, child fantasy that I dreamed of.

I did my best to keep excellent grades throughout my secondary education as a way to pay my parents back for the effort they made to keep me in my school (it was a very expensive tuition). I was part of the Honor Roll students since my very first year, and I had the highest GPA in my class year after year. However, as I started getting closer to graduation, my country started falling apart.

No one saw such a catastrophe coming. Venezuela, the richest of all South American countries in 2011, became one of the poorest countries in the world in a matter of years. As I was slowly maturing during my journey through high school, I realized my childhood dream started drifting away from me. Impotence became my biggest enemy, often causing anxiety or rage attacks every time I saw something bad on the news. And there was always something bad on the news.

Coping with these problems seemed impossible to me, and to prevent worrying my parents more than they already were, I repressed myself for a very long time. Often times I would fake a smile, pretending I did not know about my family’s worsening financial situation, and my parents’ growing desperation.

My secondary graduation arrived in the blink of an eye. Honestly, I was never ready for anything after that. My plans for college were non-existent and I had already given up on everything I wanted to achieve. I had already become a 17-year-old adult, and my choice was to either deal with adult problems, or with a silly childhood aspiration that was never going to happen. Or so I thought.

After the most random rush of events, I turned out to achieve my childhood dream. Not the rockstar-engineer-billionaire part of it, but I got the opportunity to come to the United States for my college studies. Whether it was luck, or fate, I would have never thought such an event to occur in my life.

My story relates to the popular saying of “if you never have a dream, you’ll never have a dream come true.” This saying made me wonder: “how can you achieve a goal without setting the goal first?” It is almost counterintuitive to think about. Dreaming and setting goals for oneself are important for a person to constantly progress towards said objective. Even if they are achieved by chance or by hard work, there are few experiences as rewarding as accomplishing something we set for ourselves.