High school—the grand amphitheater where dreams are born, mocked, and occasionally picked on by kids and teachers. I was a 10th-grader, standing up in class, sure of myself- with a nickname “Yoda” given to me by my friends and the assurance of a sage. The teacher, clipboard in hand, asked a seemingly innocent question: "What do you want to be when you're old?" The kind of question that turns a room full of teenagers into amateur adults.
One by one, my classmates rose like contestants on The Price Is Right, offering up answers that felt plucked from a brochure for suburban bliss. Doctors. Lawyers. Entrepreneurs. And then, it was my turn.
"I want to live in a cabin in the mountains, alone," I declared, my voice unwavering figuring it would be no different than saying I wanted to be a farmer or own a ranch.
The room? It erupted. Laughter rolled over me like a rogue wave. Even the teacher chuckled—a polite, patronizing kind of laugh, as if I’d announced my plans to become a unicorn wrangler ninja. I stood there, dead serious, wondering what in the world was so funny.
The teacher chimed in with a gentle yet dismissive voice, "You'll change your mind. No way you'll live like that when you're older."
But I doubled down. "No. That’s what I’m going to do."
The laughter ebbed as the next classmate took the floor, but I sat down, my teenage brain spinning like an old record player stuck on a single question: Why was that so far-fetched? Living alone in a mountain cabin seemed perfectly reasonable. What could possibly be so unattainable or absurd about it?
Fast-forward 25 years. There I was—smack dab in the Alaskan wilderness, living in a cabin surrounded by the remnants of an abandoned gold mine. The mountains embraced me like an old friend. Off the grid, solitude was my roommate for seven glorious years during the winters and the summers I would see people sometimes.
At some point during those quiet, snow-blanketed nights, the memory of that classroom crept back. And then it hit me like a falling icicle: the laughter wasn’t really about me. It was about them. Most people are conditioned from birth to follow a script, like actors in a play they didn’t audition for. School? It’s the rehearsal hall, training you to hit your marks, say your lines, and stick to the roles society's power players have written.
That day in 10th grade, I’d accidentally wandered off-script like I so often did and do. My dream wasn’t a lawyer, a doctor, or anything else stamped with a shiny approval sticker heck it wasn’t even a career. It was the wilderness, the cabin, and a life that didn’t require validation from anyone else. And that? That was threatening—not in a big, scary, Bigfoot-in-the-woods kind of way, but in a quiet, unsettling stir in their seat without any awareness of it.
Here’s the thing no one tells you in those school assemblies about "following your dreams": It’s not about brains, brawn, money, or connections—at least, not at first. It’s about temperament. You must be the thing you’re trying to become long before you can see it in the mirror. Think of it like building a house. The foundation isn’t bricks or beams; it’s the invisible strength that holds it all together. Your psyche—your subtle energy body, if you will—it is the foundation.
And here’s the kicker: most of us don’t even know the plot of our own story until we’ve read halfway through. Self-knowledge is the prologue no one bothers to teach. It takes years—sometimes lifetimes—to realize that the first step in becoming anything is understanding who you already are. Otherwise, you’re just playing dress-up with someone else’s dreams, doomed to spend your life feeling like an understudy in your own play that never realizes they are even an actor.
So, here’s what I’d tell my teenage self: The laughter of the teacher? It’s not at you. It’s the fear of how they have been indoctrinated, their conditioning, their inability to see past the script. Keep building your cabin, brick by brick. Someday, it’ll be home and if the foundation is strong and structured correctly to what you want to be, you will become that and learn and be, so much more than what you have been told or know you can be.
It was either that or only losers want to be alone in life, without friends, and that is why they laughed at me- either way I found truth.
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