Do you remember when the world was so simple and when you looked outside a window you saw birds, playgrounds, and the older cool kids chilling in their typical spot? Now when you look out a window, you see cars, cheaply painted houses, and smoking teenagers standing by that same old tree. It is harder to see the beauty of nature: sunsets, the rain, cloudless skies.
Family, at least at our age, seems overrated to most of us. Sure, you can say you love your family. But when is the last time you showed it? Clothes these days are so important: if you’re wearing the wrong jeans, then you might as well come to school wearing a banana suit. As for manners, we have none. We make fun of people, start rumors, and talk about people behind their backs and sometimes even do it in front of their faces. We bring each other down rather than helping to build them up again. We don’t know who is dealing with what, and talking about them isn’t going to help anything.
While I was cleaning my room yesterday, I found one of my journals from when I was eight or nine. In it, I wrote all about the life I wanted to have. It is not a diary; it just has random thoughts messily written on each page. Nothing too deep or meaningful, nothing to princessy or fictional. It’s just about the person I wanted to be when I grew up from my eight-or-nine-year-old view point. For the most part, the journal is about family, clothes, and manners.


One of the topics that appears over and over in the journal is family. In our family, we don’t have a family game night or any type of family night, even though we have plenty of chances. There is a journal entry about the “perfect” night with the family which included games, eating dinner together, and no TV. It is a basic concept, but typically overlooked. I created a plan that included cleaning up and “de-junk-ifiying” the house (clear out the stuff we don’t need). I vaguely remember saying something about cleaning up the house, but my parents were always too busy. Most kids hate doing chores, and I am no exception. However, because the house needed a desperate make-over, I made a long list of simple chores for myself. Of course, I grew tired of the chores by day two…


Of course, being a girl, I had to include clothes somewhere in my journal. Clothes don’t take up one page, or two; it takes up ten. I’ve never had just one style I’ve stuck with, so I wrote about all the styles I liked and decided until I get to college I’ll try each one and see which I like best. It included all types of style such as bohemian chic, retro, the style I wear now, and a lot of other types. Of course I didn’t call it bohemian chic or retro; it was “cute and flowy” and “colorful like a rocker.”


“Manners, manners, manners. People these days have no manners.” Strange to think an eight year old was thinking about manners… There is a list of manners in the journal, simple things like say please and thank you, ask to be excused, don’t interrupt, etc. People say I was very polite when I was younger and always used manners. I remember my parents teaching me from when I started talking to say please and thank you, have a good posture, and to always be kind to everyone around you. Then of course, the golden rule (treat others how you want to be treated) was drilled into us during elementary school. Of course, it doesn’t seem like people always act like that, but it is a good basic rule that I always followed. The journal talked about how there wouldn’t need to be cops everywhere and people in jail if people just had a little more manners (if only it was that simple.)


At the end of the journal, I wrote a long page about the exact person I wanted to be. I wrote about how I would never change my mind about it, and I would become this person. Now, time has changed, and I don’t think that way anymore. But, this person I made up is someone who would have made a great role model. Besides, who doesn’t want to be their dream person? Kids have so much creativity and it’s never appreciated. Anyway, people get so caught up in what is “cool” that they forget to be themselves. We have the time, and secretly, we all want to be this amazing person that everyone looks up to. We should all be that amazing person while we still have the chance.

“You’ve gotta dance like there’s nobody watching,
Love like you’ll never be hurt,
Sing like there’s nobody listening,
And live like it’s heaven on earth.”
— William W. Purkey