What do you want to be when you grow up?

It’s hard to imagine that it has been a year since my last blog. This one, it has been on my mind for months and it’s a very personal one that helps me to understand things from my past while treasuring my present. It’s all about this question adults used to ask us when we were kids: what do you want to be when you grow up?

The truth, I don’t know what was my reply then, I think I said Bacteriologist, like my father, then a pilot, like my grandfather Manolin, who was not able to realize his dream in 1927, due to being unable to properly move his arm. What is clear to me, is that I always dream of visiting faraway places, different cultures and people…the person who knows better this time of my life are not my parents, but a cousin that is more than a cousin, she is my sister, Maria Angelica Olivares Velilla.

Mari, how I have always called her, understood me, she knew, somehow, that I was different, I remember that I liked to draw beauty pageants and together we used to create our own pageants on paper, comparing every candidate in their different customs and together we will select our own “Miss Colombia”. Today, I think those drawings were a way to adjust to the norms that little boys don’t play with dolls or think about beauty pageants.

It was a stage of my life that was over when I found a game very similar to Lego, Estralandia, today I have searched it in Google and it was originally called “American plastic bricks”, I don’t know who gave it to me, but from that moment on, I knew that I wanted to be an Architect.

I remember those were the days of the Latin American soap operas and we used to watch every week the Mexican one: “The rich people cry too”, every Friday night we got together in my mother’s room, and while she, my grandmother and my sister watched closely the drama, I was half listening and creating a new house design, just to be replaced for a new one on the following week.

I never played again with Estralandia or never bought a Lego, I don’t draw women anymore and don’t follow with a kid’s devotion our country’s beauty pageants. I only became a pilot by wearing a uniform for a party, it was fun…but when I ask myself today the same question: what I want to be when I grow older, the answer is very clear: a world traveler…. or like what my grandmother will call me, an eternal explorer!