What's with the blog title?

     Lists, lists, lists. Whether it's grocery lists or to-do lists, I love them. I don't necessarily follow them, but I definitely love making lists. It makes me feel as if I've organized a bit of my life somehow,  and being the most disorganized person ever, it's an awesome feeling. But why am I bringing this up? Because, lists are the reason for the title of this blog. You see, ever since I was little, I lived in the future. And by that I mean that I spent the majority of my days daydreaming about my future and what kind of a person I would become. I would see aspects of people that I really admired and with my imagination, I made a collage of those aspects to form what I believed I would become. When you're young though, dreams are always taller than reality.
     I know it makes me seem old and I never thought I would say this, but my teenage years are a blur of good and bad memories. When I look back now, I feel like that "moment" has arrived. The moment I used to daydream about when I was young. It's definitely time for me to start setting some goals, achieving them, and molding my life into what I want it to be.
     After my twenty-first birthday back in March, I didn't feel any dramatic life-altering change. I was the exact same person inside a shell that was twenty-one years old. Yet (maybe because of the media hype around this birthday being a hallmark), I felt like I was now responsible for what became of me. So I made a list.
     This list consisted of 21 goals that I had for the future. A lot of it was randomness, but it had things that I knew in my heart I wanted to have done in my lifetime. Don't get it twisted...it's not a bucket list. (Well okay maybe sorta kinda but there are MANY more things I'd put on my bucket list) What sets this list apart is that these are 21 things I aspired to do when going from a teenager to an adult. When I'm old and hopefully not grey, I want to be able to look back on this list and remember the dreams I had when my life was spread out before me. I hope that at that moment, I'll have reason to smile. I hope that I will have gone after all (or most) of those dreams.
     The beauty of childhood is the innocence it contains. We're all so oblivious to society, expectations, and hurdles. It's so simple for a child to see themselves being what they truly want to be whether it's a designer, a model, a pilot, or a baker. There are no trivial things such as loans, distance, or job prospects holding them down. When I was young, I wanted to be an author more than anything else. I still do and maybe someday I will become one. But then I realize that you don't "become" an author. If you write, if you write anything at all, you already are one. Writing this post is making me an author and keeping this blog will allow me to remain as one and keep the dream alive.
     Which brings us back to this blog. Why is it named Twenty-one Dreams? It's one of them. It's one of the things on my list.

xo Anum