Dreams: My Unrealized Reality

Dreams: My Unrealized Reality All people have hopes and dreams. What one does with those hopes and dreams, separates them from every other person on the planet. It is a shame to just let them dissipate without acting upon them. But first, one needs to distinguish between what is a dream and what is an unrealized reality… Ever since I was a little boy, I knew I wanted to be a chef. Every career day at school, no matter who came to talk about their job, or what my friends dressed up as, or what was thought of as the “cool job”, I knew what I wanted to be. I wanted to make things for people that they could appreciate in a more filling way—pun intended. Taking college classes puts me one step closer to fulfilling my lifelong goal of becoming a chef. Unbeknownst to the majority of teenagers, you actually have to work and put forth an effort to have that dream come true. Therefore, unfortunately many never get to come face to face with their dream. I never fit in with the scene in my hometown of Argonia, Kansas. With a majority of the very small population being church-going farmers teaching their kids to be church-going farmers, I was instantly the odd one out simply with my career choice. Growing up, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my mother, helping her bring out sandwiches to the workers in the field, or making a side dish for dinner. It was where I thrived; I never wanted to leave. As I got older, I left to kitchen to help my stepfather in the field. I liked helping my family—wrangling in sick cows to give them a shot, or feeding them hay—but I never liked it enough to come back after school and inherit the farm. I liked being in the kitchen more. As the youngest boy in a masculine, farmer family with two older stepbrothers, I had standards to live up to, expectations to be met. So I busied myself with the one cooking course that they had at the school and continued to help my mother at dinner time, but my stepfather during the weekends and after