Today is my Mars return, an event that happens approximately once every two years, when Mars returns to the place where it was on the day you were born. It is a day when you can tap into Mars’ power and energy, and channel it into whatever endeavor that you feel most driven to. This could be work, a creative project, your sex life, etc. I am starting with this because I took today off from my “day job,” or the work that I do in exchange for a living wage, in order to have time and space to channel this energy into working on a writing project. I am starting, instead, with this blog post. It has been a while since I last shared on this platform, and the reason for this pause is that I found myself pushing myself to write about things that I didn’t really want to write about, and so I just didn’t do it. It is also because I have started a long-term writing project that I am very excited about and which is taking up a lot of my “free” time. But today, I want to start my Mars-driven writing spree with this reflection on doing your dreams.

Do you remember the first thing you ever said in response to the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

If not the first thing you ever said in response to that question, then the first thing you really gravitated to, the one you stuck with and repeated to yourself, perhaps until you reached adolescence?

For me, it was a singer/songwriter. I wanted to be like Selena, the icon, the Mexican-American girl from humble Texas roots who changed the world with her powerful voice. I wanted to write songs about love – feeling love, yearning for love. Cute, catchy, poppy songs about love. The first one that I wrote was in a Barbie diary with a lock, a birthday gift from a family member, and it was titled, “Somewhere, Somehow.” I was 7 or 8 when I wrote this ballad about the boy I had had a crush on in my first grade class in San Jose, CA, where I no longer lived. I would gaze up at the moon, like movie-Selena does in the film, Selena, and picture myself on a stage. I held onto this dream until I was maybe 11 or 12, after I had seen more of the world and of humanity, and realized that life was more complex than first grade crushes.

I wonder why adults ask children that question at such a young age. Had I not been asked the question until I was a bit older, what might my initial response have been? After songwriter came journalist. I had started writing poetry but I told myself that it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to achieve the upward socioeconomic mobility that I sought through poetry, and that journalism was a great way for me to get paid to write. I also believed that it would give me the opportunity to write about the many wrongs that I saw in the world, to bring society’s attention to them, and in doing so, solve them. I stuck with this dream from the ages of 13 to 20, when I was getting ready to graduate from Journalism school, and had finally become so disillusioned with the media that I thought I should dedicate myself to critiquing and transforming it, instead.

And then I started working full-time. I told myself I would pursue stories as an independent reporter in my free time, imagining that I would have so much of it compared to my life as a full-time student and slightly-more-than part-time administrative support student-worker. I told myself I would only do the enrollment counselor gig – the first offer I received after graduating – until I got into a graduate program on media studies. I imagined I might go on to be a professor at a prestigious university, where I would spend my days convincing young, privileged minds that the media was a tool of white supremacy and that it must be reconstructed.

Then, in the spring of 2015, less than a year after I graduated from college, a couple months after being rejected by multiple doctorate programs (I honestly thought I could skip a master’s…), came a realization. An understanding that had been several months in the making, but came to fruition in a moment. I was listening to the This American Life episode, Three Miles, sitting at my desk in the enrollment marketing office, processing data on the thousands of students applying to ASU’s online programs, when I was struck by the understanding that the education inequity that is described in that episode, exists everywhere, and sometimes even within closer distances. I realized that in my high school, as I was being challenged and intrigued by my excellent education in Honors & AP classes, three doors down my classmates were receiving a sub-standard education, with classrooms led by teachers who were not invested in their success.

I realized this because I had spent my junior year of high school in a “college prep” English class due to a clerical error, as I had enrolled in my school’s AP English Language & Composition class, but was told there wasn’t enough room. For a year I rolled my eyes in English, in a classroom that was more poor and more diverse than my AP/Honors classrooms, who were treated as sub-human by the teacher, who was actually the school’s athletic director, and who was either not there or would leave in the middle of class 3 – 4 days out of the week. I was so frustrated by the curriculum, which was closer to my 7th grade GATE English class than what my friends were learning a few classrooms away in AP English. I thought, 5 years later, as I listened to that This American Life episode, that this was the wrong that I must right. A year after that episode aired I had quit my enrollment counseling job, moved to California for a brief, failed attempt to enter the EdTech industry, and was getting ready to move back to Arizona to start working at one of the largest education-focused nonprofits in this stolen land.

For a few years I dreamed of starting my own non-profit dedicated to solving the education inequity issue, I even dreamed of one day being appointed Secretary of Education, where I would be in a position to influence broad-sweeping legislation that would once and for all make access to an excellent education a right guaranteed to all.

But I work, full-time, making money for someone else, earning a comfortable living wage. I have undertaken debt in order to secure this comfortable living – financed the portion of my college education that wasn’t covered by grants & scholarships, financed a decent car, took out a mortgage to purchase a home. And the neverending bills keep me tied to this need to keep the money coming in. I certainly never dreamed, as a child, of spending the majority of my waking hours training fundraisers on how to use Salesforce, day after day. This white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system in which we live is not very forgiving to the dreams of children.

Several months ago I had a birth chart reading with Yakari Gabriel Torres, writer, astrologer, and Director of Stari Agency. Within minutes of seeing my chart for the first time, Yakari told me that there is nothing stopping me from writing, and that for me, writing was the easiest thing in the world. She said, during that reading, that what we dream of doing as children is often aligned with what we were born to do.

I can just imagine what this world might be like without this system of global white supremacist patriarchal capitalism pushing so many of us to sacrifice our dreams for the sake of surviving, for the sake of having a place to sleep at night and food to eat. What might our collective efforts, channeled toward what we are each born to do, have brought into being? Instead, for over 500 years, humanity has been pre-occupied with this global, exploitative system. It began with European men stealing land, labor, and lives in order to secure all the resources the Earth had to offer. And it has us here, trapped in a vicious cycle of giving our time and energy in exchange for a paycheck, taking home a portion of the wealth that we build for other people.

I want to be brave enough to do my dreams. I have witnessed my husband go through so much change, take so many chances with his career, in order to move ever closer to his dream of helping his community build wealth through real estate. I have witnessed my best friend put herself out there, make connections in a new community, go after her worth, in order to move ever closer to her dream of building a more just world. I have witnessed another close friend move clear across the country, away from his family, to pursue his dream of acting and performing.

I am pushing myself now to do my dreams. I no longer dream of writing songs, but I dream of writing books. Books of poetry, non-fiction books about my life and my family, science fiction novels. I dream of writing television shows and movies, and seeing my characters come to life on the screen. I dream of a life that is safe, full of love and comfort. I dream of having time to teach my children and watch them grow.

This year I am challenging myself to do my dreams, to believe for the first time since I was a little girl that I truly can do anything I set my mind too. I am challenging myself to trust that I will attract all of the abundance that I need to live the life that I desire. I am challenging myself to break free from this mindset that I must sacrifice my joy for the sake of my survival.