What happened to our childhood dreams?

She had always been a very creative child, doing painting, crafting, drawing etc. Her grandmother was a professional tailor and taught her how to sew. From that moment on, she stopped playing with her dolls; instead she turned them into models for her new collection of clothes.

Whenever she was asked by people, what she wanted to be, when she was grown up, she told them that she wanted to be a fashion designer. Her mother and grandmother encouraged her plans very much. They already dreamed how they would visit a fashion show in Paris watching their little girl's creations on the cat walk.

When she was 11 years old, the little girl was given her first chance to actually make a fashion collection for money. At her school, they had a Christmas market, where the pupils would produce home-made gifts and sell them, giving the returns to charity. She was in a group which made earrings and she really loved that task. She chose colourful beads and put them together creatively, producing very lovely and colourful earrings. However, her instructor told her: “You cannot use so many colours. Colours are not in fashion in the moment. Nobody will buy such colourful earrings.”

Reluctantly, the girl put away the yellow, red and green beads and only produced earrings that were either blue or purple. At the Christmas market, only her mother bought one pair of earrings that she had made. The earrings by the other kids, which were only black or silver, the colours of fashion that year, sold much better. She heard two kids say about some shiny blue earrings she had made: “Look at those. Who would wear such screaming blue earrings?”

She despaired. Before feeling ashamed that none of her earrings were sold, she bought a pair herself. The lesson she learned that day way that being a fashion designer had nothing to do with being creative but with copying what other people said was in fashion. She decided that if that was the case, she did not want to be a fashion designer anymore.

Fourteen years have passed since then. She has gone through many career plans ever since and threw all those in the garbage. Now, she is one of those people who at 25 still don’t know what they want to do with their lives. But she has kept the blue and shiny earrings all those years. And when she wears them now, in a time where colours are in fashion again, everybody tells her: “I love your earrings, where did you get them?”