“I Could Never Do That!” – Self-Limitation

My mom and I hear enough statements of “I could never do that!” to fill an entire anthology of Tolstoy’s works. For mom, it is in reaction to finding out she is homeschooling/homeschooled my siblings and me. For me, it is because I am paving my own “path o’ higher ed”; basically, homeschooling myself.

What are these people trying to say? Are they trying to use flattery of some sort? Are they out of a loss of anything else to say? Maybe, I don’t know. What it sounds to me is a bunch of people limiting their children and themselves, respectively.

I think, more often than not, it translates to “I don’t want to do that because it would ruin my chances at getting a job that pays any more than minimum wage.” And I wonder if that would be followed by a “….but I wish I could.”

Whatever it is, what I mainly want to address with this is, “Si, se puede.” Yes, you can. If you want liberation from the conventional schooling environment, and learn what you want to learn when you want to do it, but just KNOW you “could never do that” – you are dead wrong. Shut up those voices of Everyone and Everything Else in your head. Turn up that voice inside of your heart. Listen.

Keep this in mind when making your New Years resolutions, list of goals, or whatever you’re doing in preparation for the year to come: that little voice in your head speaks Spanish sometimes. “Si, se puede.”

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