When I was four years old my dad would mow the lawn on Saturday afternoons. He had one of those lawn mowers that would spit the grass shavings back onto the lawn. As a little girl, I would gather these shavings and form them into bird’s nests I would put in the bushes in front of my house. I wanted to help the precious animals.

My older cousin was watching me create these nests one day. He stopped me and asked me why I wasn’t putting rocks in the nest. He explained to me that the nest needed rocks because that’s what the birds turned into eggs so they could make baby birds. After that, I always put a couple rocks in my grass shaving nest.

There is a point in everyone’s life where the magic we believed in as small children disappears. At some point, a bird’s ability to create their child from a rock seems silly. I do not think this loss of ability to believe in things like this is due to our education. A science teacher taught me how baby birds were made long after I stopped believing in the rock birds.

The loss of innocence in a person’s life destroys the magic and fairytales that once captivated our hearts. I have read a lot of books and seen a lot of movies; my heart longed for the adventure I read and saw. I once believed I would travel the world, be a New York Times  Best Selling Author by the age of 20, and be whisked away to a beautiful castle by the world’s most handsome man. Traveling the world now seems impractical; I have my education to focus on and a lack of money to contend with. I’m already 20 years old and have yet to write anything substantial. And the man of my childhood dreams now seems frivolous rather than stable.

We grow up, but our dreams don’t seem to grow up with us. They get swept away and replaced by things society tells us are possible. We lose our naive spirits and forget the things we once dreamed of. My friends and I were discussing recently why it is that the moments we remember as being the most perfect in our lives are always so far in the past. We remember a point before we realized there was hate and anger and evil in the world.

I remember telling my mom some time early on in my high school career that I wanted to go back to being a little kid—before people were capable of being mean enough to destroy someone’s reputation, before the first boy broke my heart and before I knew babies came from two people’s love and not a stork.

We all have to grow up and lose the innocence that once made our childhoods a world of curious wonder. We stop laying in the grass and finding shapes in the clouds. We stop laughing at fart jokes and wishing on stars. However, growing up doesn’t have to be about losing our dreams.

The world may corrupt our hearts and make us realize not everything in this world is beautiful, but it does not have to crush our spirit and dreams. We must not let it. We must fight for our dreams.

I still want to be a best-selling author, and I can’t give up on that. The world may tell me  I’m not good enough or that it’s virtually impossible to achieve this, but I still hope that it happens one day. I still believe it can.

A little boy once told me he wanted to be a tiger when he grew up. Now he is older, dreaming of being a doctor. Of course, this boy came to know that he could not be a tiger no matter how hard he tried. But, he still has a dream.

In a world full of ruthless people ready to shoot you down, a world in which you will be disappointed, you need hope. Maybe your life will never be the fairytale you imagined it to be, but the hope that it will be will push you to work harder. We work hard in the hope that our dreams will become a reality. And, if they do, the childlike wonder you once felt for them just might return. You just might believe in magic after all.