The millennial generation—that’s us, right? The next generation of super stars, cultural icons, and CEOs, ready to conquer the world because, as we’ve been told, the world is at our fingertips. We are young, restless, and ambitious, with greater access to education and more platforms to innovate than any previous generation. It’s what we have been told by our parents, what we hear from the media, and what we have each internalized to the point that the “American Dream” has seeped so deep under our skin and into our veins that it must be true. And to some, in truth, the ‘dream’ still exists in full… …but to others, the “American Dream” feels like fallacy, a scam, and well, just distant to our current lives. Our generation lives in a world where the ‘dream’ seems to be on a fragile island, ready to break apart any second by the enormous challenges in America—both domestic and foreign—that have seemingly put ‘our’ chance to drive off with the “American Dream” stuck firmly in neutral. Our TV screens and Twitter feeds are filled with an almost superfluous amount of news headlines detailing the spiraling U.S. (and world?) economy, a broken and partisan political system, wars across the world with tyrant dictators, increasing healthcare costs, failing K-12 schools, and of course, that haunting unemployed statistic. The “American Dream” seems to be just a line in our old history textbooks, at best, a reachable albeit unrealistic scenario and at worst, a terrifying nightmare.

Hello to all the beautiful people out there in the world—both those who I love and those who I have not had the fortune of meeting in person, but through my words in cyberspace. I apologize for not blogging in a long time. It is not due to a lack of desire or a lack of thought; in fact, there are so many constant emotions flowing from my heart to my brain and always a continual flow of ideas from my brain to my heart that I often do not know where to begin in the process of documenting it all. Of course, I always want to share all the beautiful things and disappointments too, but time is challenging, and with so much reading and writing for school, it can be a challenge to justify the time for personal reflection. And as for my academic life, it is an exciting time—albeit stressful and pressure-filled—as I (once again) apply to Doctoral programs this fall. It’s hard to believe two years have past since I went through this process and decided to pursue a Masters first. It’s scary, in a way, how fast it has all gone, and I am learning fast that life does not slow down….in fact, it speeds up very, very rapidly.

However, as it speeds up, our lives are no longer empty jars that we begin to fill with experiences, but with a jar that has many experiences where we pick and choose the experiences that seem relevant or important to use or reflect on.