The day was August 29, 2009. I was just a month away from my third birthday, living in New York City with my mother, brother, and father. It was on this day that my destiny was decided.
My mother recalls walking the streets of Times Square and realizing that people as far as the eye could see had suddenly stopped in their tracks. For the first time, Ma was surrounded by still New Yorkers, all gawking at the flashing headlines on city screens. Ma came home and turned on the television to introduce my older brother and I to the King of Pop for the first time.
To say I was entranced is an understatement. My eyes were wide as saucers for hours while we watched Michael Jackson’s music videos being broadcast in the wake of his passing. Twelve days later, we’d join over 30 million Americans in watching his memorial service live. And months later, when Michael’s concert rehearsal documentary film, This Is It, was posthumously released, Ma took my brother and I to the movies to see my new hero on the big screen. The famous story is that my newly three-year-old self got up out of my seat, made a beeline to the aisle, and started dancing to his music in the dark theatre.
I knew from that point on that I wanted to sing.
Having been raised while moving from country to country, my childhood was something I’ve since come to know as unusual. I was unsure how to articulate it as a little girl, but my life often felt like a hodgepodge quilt sewn from random pieces of fabric. In certain lights, the quilt was colourful, vibrant, and alive in its own esoteric beauty. But in a different light, the quilt would seem out of balance, ill-fitted, and overwhelming. Because of my childhood circumstances -- or maybe my own predisposition -- I always felt intense pressure to either decide that my life was one or the other. Was it painfully uncertain, or simply unique?
I like to think that everyone faces at least a tiny bit of dysfunction during their lifetime, and that no one is 100% protected by the barriers of “normalcy.” These barriers weren’t so strong when I was a little girl, broken down by years of abuse and violence. Understandably, the unpredictable patchwork of my “life-quilt” was incessantly meddling in my emotional health and development.
Yet there was something that kept my quilt feeling tolerable, even comfortable, throughout. This something wasn’t just music, or my childhood hero, Michael Jackson. But the dreams that were birthed from my adulation of both.
I often reflect on my lifelong love for Michael, for both the artistic genius and the man behind it. There are many reasons I believe I clung to him from a young age. Some days I’m sure it was a coping mechanism to withstand my childhood traumas. Recently, I’ve conceded that perhaps Michael was a symbol of the father figure I never had. After all, Michael reiterated many of the lessons my own mother strictly taught my brother and I: Principles of faith, modesty, hard work, compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves, care for the environment, and most importantly, relentless, relentless ambition. One role model’s reiteration of another’s teachings, and vice versa, is what I imagined healthy co-parenting must look like.
My dream brought me promise, a hope for what my future would be. My dream brought me a sense of confidence
Regardless, I spent the majority of my childhood trying to feel closer to him. Through his interviews, his contemporaries, his controversies, and his prolific career; Michael became the standard for me. It became apparent soon after that day in 2009 that I was never just a music lover, but an aspiring artist myself.
My inner monologue found a solid routine over the years. Okay, he began performing at around four, five years old. He released his first studio album with his brothers at the age of nine. That was my goal, I’d tell myself, imagining my creative process at the age of seven before fully comprehending the term “creative process” itself. I imagined that I would soon be like my role model: Performing in front of thousands, innovating the pop culture scene, and crafting constantly as the biggest, the brightest, the best, the youngest to ever do it. “Study the greats and become greater,” Michael once said. I heard the same at home from Ma, and that was all the assurance I needed.
The only thing that stood in my way was that I was living abroad. And my single mother didn’t necessarily have the time or energy to completely invest in her post-infant daughter’s dreams of stardom. Not to mention the ongoing abuse from certain family members that consumed our days and my mother’s nights. In the face of this reality, my childhood dream didn’t stand a chance.
So, I adjusted. Scored by the late-night screaming matches, in the foreground of memories of being hurt by those I trusted most, I’d hide out in the sanctuary of my dream, imagining, imagining, imagining … My dream brought me promise, a hope for what my future would be. My dream brought me a sense of confidence that a therapist would later teach me was otherwise unusual for a child abuse victim to have. My dream kept me going.
And I performed wherever I could, whenever I could, whenever the absence of anxiety would allow me to. I sang in public, in private, at school, at home. I wrote songs, my mother took me to voice lessons, and my brother walked me to dance classes. This was my life.
Now it’s 2024.
I am seventeen years old. I am weeks away from taking my SATs, and I have well-meaning family members interrogating me about prospective college majors (I stay knowing that even speaking of pursuing a music major will get me judgemental looks). I’m no longer a little girl, but more importantly, I’m no longer in the situation I was in as a little girl. My life is no longer that dumbfounding quilt of uncertainty. And in the aftermath, I’m faced with the reality of the dream I’ve built my life around, my childhood means of survival.
Yet I am aware that I am not the only seventeen-year-old feeling overwhelmed by the idea that my future is increasingly decided by my present, or that my future is my present. Like many others, I feel that it’s all meshed together.
I am not the only seventeen-year-old feeling overwhelmed by the idea that my future is increasingly decided by my present, or that my future is my present
This is unfamiliar. It’s scary.
The question that keeps me up every night is about what I’m supposed to do with my past now. How, I wonder, do my childhood dreams translate into my burgeoning adulthood when I’m so used to the safety of hypotheticals?
I know my role well. I am Deya. A singer, a writer, an activist, a good student, a speaker, a listener. There are a handful of things I know I do best. I want, I pray, I aspire, I dream. But there’s nothing more terrifying than figuring out how to do.
And my biggest fear is that I’ll become average, or simply coast, never truly finding my path after a whirlwind of a start to this life. This is my first and last time getting to be a human being, and there’s so much I want to do while I’m here. I can’t come up with a perfect conclusion for my anxiety because anxiety has no perfect conclusion: I can only concede that I don’t have all the answers.
But hey, what else is new.
Deya Nurani is a high school student based in the US.
