Dreams or Directions? - Amna Tayyab (UHS Runner Up)
This is my story, a story written with my name Amna and the dreams my parents had when they named me and the dreams that my childhood in Gujranwala had witnessed. However, there is another Amna who moves in the corridors of my high school and who carries the responsibilities of a teenager in a foreign country. The two of us live in a world of opposites while one of us can discover a joy in the fact that numbers exist, the other struggles with the problem of belonging.
Gujranwala views me as the shy girl, still wandering under the stars. Every evening my Papa would hold up his hand and tell me about stars and the great men and great deeds connected with constellations as if they were people he knew. This Amna—that young, full-faced girl with shining round eyes, when she was not so shy and cunning—wanted to become a space traveler with the stars on her collar.
Now, here in the Bronx, I am more often enshrouded by the coils of culture and my cultural beliefs. My dual identity emerges: Amna the student embarrassed by calculus and the straight lines of physics, and Amna the daughter stuck in the playful banter with my siblings, a strict elder sister one instance and a giggly friend the next. Laughter is that safety net in this chaotic world; Nevertheless the pressure of accomplishment pulls me back into the quiet shell.
In mathematics one finds comfort, where issues melt into answers, comfort in shared grammar transcending geographic location. The equations touch a thing in my heart, in the manner of a good friend catching our whispered thoughts. Meet Amna the mathematician who loves the perfumed world of beauty of logic and precision as far as the proofs of the universe would take her. Is it possible that the fear of the unknown generated by this passion when I was a child can create a niche for me among the numerous events of high school?
But who am I becoming? Sometimes even fear appears like a hidden evil twin. There is Amna, the dreamer who meets real life Amna fearing that she will one day wake up from her dream of pursuing math and maybe astrophysics. In moments of self-doubt, I wonder if my dreams are too lofty; absurdly, I sway to the side of the obedient daughter, the one who has to work a ‘real’ job. I can hear my teachers, my family, the world telling me: ‘Why don’t you take something easy for a change?’
But again there is another voice inside me, power packed with a new vigor of champion. It makes me understand that goal, however fuzzy it may be, is worth pursuing. There is the future mathematician Amna struggling between her and Amna the obedient daughter, a conflict in sole character who wants to live both worlds on the threadbare of ambition and prejudice.
Will I be the one who is finally refuting traditions and welcoming the unfamiliar? This oftentimes haunts me like undertones in a room, challenged only by the giggling happening among my kin. Lovers’ faces, my family’s faces / smiling or waiting and still, there’s emptiness / an ocean where my dreams / sometimes wander all alone / far from home / maybe, potentially, hopefully, still having a chance to go to college far from home or a dorm somewhere in NYC.
When I am alone I write those dreams I would usually constraint due to pressures from other people. In my mind’s eye, there is Amna the astronaut floating in space. She sits or stands alone gazing at the blue-green sphere of the Earth against the black velvet of the firmament. This is where I want to be: flying through galaxies and having feelings of home in my chest. I pay homage to the girl who tried to grasp for the stars in Gujranwala; I rejoice in the existence of Amna who is struggling with life in the Bronx. Both are components of the fabric of the person I am today.
It may be that, if and as I continue to mature, I will be able to do so successfully and thus integrate the different voices. Is there a chance for reconciliation? Well, just as much as there is a blank space that we fill to compensate for the missing half of an equation. I can be Amna— the threads of my roots, the dreams I hold and the shades of grey confined between the binaries of the society I was raised in. In the middle of it all, I want to be the girl dreaming under the stars and the woman striding purposefully through the corridors of her high school.
This tension of who I was, who I am and who I want to be forms my concept of self. Thus, I began to put together the concept of identity: it is not a strand, no, not even a bundle of threads, it is rather a constellation, an endless spectrum of strings. In understanding all of this, I am in a position to embrace all the facets of my personality as are facets of Amnas.