the great american dream

a valedictorian of a dream that wasn’t mine

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everything i had ever learned about america growing up was entirely against my will. it seeped into my consciousness like sunlight through the cracks, through its games, its shows, its music, and its movies. i never asked to be taught any of it. but it was everywhere.

my elder brother would switch the channel from takeshi’s castle to disney shows, and i would groan as the suite life of zack and cody or hannah montana took over the screen. but eventually, i gave in. lizzie mcguire with her awkward charm. alex russo casting sarcastic spells. everything was bright, neat, and emotionally solved by the twenty-minute mark.

back then, i didn’t even know that san andreas was a real place; i just knew my brother played it endlessly on his PC, and i’d hear the low, gritty sound of early 2000s hip-hop bleed into the hallway. i couldn’t pronounce the name, but it was already becoming a part of me. i remember when baby by justin bieber had just come out; another sudden inheritance from the american dream. it didn’t feel like a choice. it felt like osmosis.

those early years planted something i didn’t understand. it wasn’t until the golden age of youtube somewhere between 2012 and 2016 that this idea started to grow roots. the era of back-to-school hauls, DIY room decor, PewDiePie, Marzia, Bethany Mota, and the ice bucket challenge. i was at the perfect age for influence. it was all so impossibly shiny. and somehow, in that whirlpool of vlog cameras and locker organization videos, i stumbled across wattpad.

wattpad stories were their own kind of seduction. they were almost all set in america. american teens with american high schools. proms and cheerleaders. football games. slow dances. red plastic cups. confessions under bleachers. and god, lockers. those magical little rectangles of metal that somehow held dreams, secrets, spare clothes, makeup kits, and enough snacks to feed a small village.

i wanted one so badly. a locker to decorate, a best friend who waited by it, a crush who’d lean on it and ask if i was coming to the game.

meanwhile, i was attending a conservative private school where uniforms were stitched to regulation, where the girls sat on one side and the boys on another. no one danced. if anyone had asked me to prom, it would’ve required a letter of permission from the principal. our classes were all in the same room. there was no walking from locker to locker, only different teachers walking into the same space. and i followed the rules because that’s what you do when you’re a kid trying to be good in the wrong story.

but america? it looked like the right story.

as i grew older and some say wiser, my dream evolved. i discovered gilmore girls. pitch perfect. euphoria. now my vision of america wasn’t just about school dances and lockers. it was uni clubs and study groups. it was working a shift at the bookstore on campus, or laying on the grass between lectures, highlighters in hand, coffee in thermos, laughter in the background. it was huge libraries during finals week, soft jazz in headphones, a five-dollar coffee and a twenty-five page essay due at midnight. it was sitting in lecture halls with giant screens and professors who wore tweed and told stories.

it was community, independence, and rhythm.

it’s strange to admit how much of my imagined coming-of-age was shaped by a world i was never a part of. a geography i could point to on a map but never call home. it was always somewhere else, happening to someone else but i felt it. i held it in my chest as though it belonged to me. and maybe, for a while, it did.

i finished university last week. my campus didn’t look like the ones in my dreams, but i loved it anyway. we had our own little patches of grass. we had chai instead of coffee, stairwells instead of libraries, cheap apartments instead of dorms. and yet i mourn the girl i never got to be. the one in denim jackets and combat boots, skateboarding to class with a hotdog in hand, writing essays in cafés that offered student discounts, drinking redbull and wearing pajama pants to the library. i mourn not for what i lacked, but for what i imagined so vividly that it almost feels like memory.

i know now that the american dream has its own ghosts. tuition debts. job scarcity. healthcare nightmares. and i’m not sure i would’ve fared any better there. in fact, i may have struggled more: drowned in a system that looks glossy only from the outside. but logic and longing don’t always live in the same room. because even now, when i scroll through old youtube videos, or hear the word “prom,” or see a row of gray lockers in a tv show it tugs at me. not painfully, but persistently. like a version of myself waving from a different timeline. like a photograph of someone i never was but still grieve for.

sometimes it hits me in the smallest ways. a scene in a movie. a locker slamming shut. a character getting ready for senior prom while her friends gather in a bedroom full of string lights and polaroids. that life still feels close enough to touch, but never close enough to hold. i never lived it, and yet i miss it. i mourn it. not because i needed it to survive, but because it shaped the outlines of what i thought growing up would look like.

i’ve made peace with it, though. with this quiet ache that visits sometimes. i’ve learned that the dreams we outgrow don’t disappear. they just shed their skins, slip into other forms. they linger in old notebooks, in songs we once played on loop, in half-finished drafts of stories we thought we’d complete someday. they sit at the back of our minds, like extras in a play we never got to audition for, watching gently, waiting for a nod. and though i won’t be dancing at homecoming or decorating a parking spot with glitter paint and inside jokes, i still carry those stories with me. they remind me of who i wanted to be, and how deeply i wanted. and that wanting, earnest, wide-eyed, and a little naive, was never useless.

because the truth is, even if i didn’t live that dream, it gave me one. it gave me a version of freedom, of rebellion, of selfhood. it taught me to imagine beyond the walls i was raised in. it taught me that wanting something, even if you never get it, still counts. it stretches your mind. it opens your heart. and in the end, that’s where every dream begins in the quiet miracle of imagining something different, something more, something yours.

so no, i won’t hang fairy lights in a dorm room. i won’t scribble my name on a locker door. but i will still believe in the magic of starting over, of moving forward with pieces of dreams that once were.

and if that dream begins in imagination, then maybe it never really ends.