Do you ever sit and wonder if your younger self would be proud of the version of you today?
Let’s be honest. It is hard not to.
At some point, we all had a picture in our head of who we thought we would become. We had answers ready when adults asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. We had timelines. Dreams. Imaginary versions of ourselves walking around in jobs we had only seen on television, living lives we had not yet learned how to afford, becoming people we did not yet know the cost of becoming.
So I guess I can go ahead and say it.
I still ain’t a Texas Ranger.
Yep. In the eyes of a ranger, the unsuspecting stranger.
That was me. I would fold pieces of paper in half and write, “Matthew Grady, Special Agent in Charge.” One Christmas, my godparents bought me a CSI kit, and you could not tell me I was not running fingerprints all day. I would dust the surface, use the tape to lift the print, and run it through my imaginary computer until I found a “familiar match.”
Looking back, I may have been a little too serious about wanting to be the police.
But I think what I was really drawn to was not the badge as much as the idea of being useful when something went wrong. I liked the thought of helping people. Showing up in the middle of confusion. Standing in the gap when someone needed answers, protection, or simply the reassurance that somebody cared enough to do something.
That is the thing about childhood imagination. Adults sometimes reduce it to something cute. Something children do because they do not yet understand reality.
But I am not sure that is right.
Sometimes children imagine because they understand more than we think. They may not have the language for instability, absence, struggle, or fear, but they know when the world around them feels uncertain. So they construct another world in their mind. They picture a version of themselves with a title, a mission, a purpose, a reason to keep going.
Before I had stability, I had imagination.
Before I had language for survival, I had a picture of somewhere else.
Growing up on the east side of Savannah was not particularly hard in the way people sometimes imagine hardship. But it did lack proximity to certain examples of what I thought success looked like.
And success, to me, was never really about who had the newest car or the fanciest clothes.
Success looked like stability.
It looked like somebody unloading groceries from the back of a car. It looked like a van door opening and a basketball rolling out with equipment for a kid’s practice. It looked like a parent or guardian standing there, excited to watch a child run off with their friends.
That felt like something.
That felt attainable.
I remember walking down LeGrand Street, swinging my arms, thinking about all the places on the map I might visit one day and all the things I might learn. I had no idea where life would take me, but I knew I wanted to see more than what was immediately in front of me.
That is why I think imagination gets underestimated.
It is not always escape.
Sometimes it is evidence.
Evidence that some part of you still believes there is more to see, more to become, and more to live through than the circumstances surrounding you at the time.
I think about young people now, and I wonder how many of them still have room to imagine. Not in the simple way adults ask children what they want to be when they grow up. I mean in the deeper way, the ability to picture a life that feels safe, whole, and possible.
That question matters when so many young people are carrying a heaviness they do not always have the words to explain. In 2023, the CDC found that 4 in 10 high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.
That number should stop us. Not because every young person needs another motivational speech, but because a generation cannot dream freely if it is always trying to survive emotionally.
Maybe that is why the photo hit me the way it did.
I saw a photo of myself from what looks like a birthday party. I was probably no more than ten years old. I have seen the photo before, but it is hard to pinpoint my exact age. Partly because I barely remember the party, and partly because I was already 5’11” by the time I was in sixth grade.
It is an old, blurry photo. The kind that feels less like evidence and more like memory.
I am standing there in a birthday hat, surrounded by other kids, caught in a moment I do not fully remember but somehow still recognize.
The first thing that came to my mind was, “My mom was doing the best she could with us.”
Then I thought, “I hope I made him proud.”
That is a strange thing to feel when looking at a photo of yourself as a child. You are looking at someone who is you, but not fully you yet. Someone who carries your name, your face, your imagination, but not yet your wounds. Not yet your disappointments. Not yet your understanding of what life will ask of you.
I could spend my days interrogating why my dad did not raise me.
I could spend my days thinking about the nights when the lights were out and candles guided our path around the house. I could remember my mother knocking on a neighbor’s door, asking if we could run an extension cord from their house to ours so she could cook for us on a hot plate.
I could remember not having a washer or dryer, washing clothes in the tub, and hanging them on the line outside.
That was struggle.
But it was also formation.
It gave me a work ethic I am proud of. It gave me the willpower to believe in myself. It gave me eyes that could recognize effort even when life did not look polished. It taught me that dignity does not disappear because money is short, and love does not become less real because the house is dark.
My mother was doing the best she could with what she had.
And in many ways, so was that little boy.
He was imagining a future before he had language for survival. He was playing investigator before he understood pain. He was dreaming of helping people before he knew how badly he would one day need people to help him.
I think about my godmother, too. I still hear her voice in my ear.
“You’re a man. Look people in the eye when you talk to them.”
She taught me that as a kid, and somehow, it stayed with me. In rooms I never imagined walking into, in places I once thought belonged to other people, I remembered to stand tall, look people in the face, and walk with confidence.
Maybe that is why looking at that photo stopped me.
Because I did not just see a kid at a birthday party.
I saw a boy who had no idea what was coming.
He did not know there would be nights when the lights went out. He did not know he would have to grow up faster than he should. He did not know he would spend years trying to understand absence, disappointment, and the complicated inheritance of being strong too early.
We spend so much time measuring ourselves against what we have not become.
The job we did not get. The dream that changed. The timeline that did not happen. The version of success we once imagined but never reached.
But maybe becoming is not always about matching the picture we had as children.
Maybe becoming is about preserving the part of us that had the courage to dream before there was evidence that the dream was possible.
No, I did not become a Texas Ranger.
But I became someone who still wants to help people. I became someone who asks questions, searches for truth, and tries to stand in the gap when things are unclear or unfair. I became someone who knows what struggle feels like and still believes in stability, dignity, and hope.
I became someone that little boy could trust.
And maybe that is enough.
Because we never really know when we reach the point of being satisfied with who we have become. There is always another goal, another dream, another room we are trying to walk into. But halfway through 2026, I think I am learning to celebrate what once seemed so simple.
I made it here.
And to that little boy in the birthday hat, standing in a photo he probably never thought would mean anything years later, I think I finally know what I want to say:
You’ll be alright, kid.
Not because life will be easy.
Not because everything will make sense.
But because one day, you will look back and realize that even when life did not give you everything you needed, something in you kept reaching forward.