Picture+Narrative+Example

"Follow your dreams!" my mother said when I was just a baby piglet on the barnyard floor. "I wanna dance, mama!" I replied as I swirled around in circles watching the dirt and the dust spin around me like magic fairies encouraging me to dance faster and faster. I knew from that day on that I could make it.

Then, a few years later, I arrived at my first day of school decked out in my favorite pink tutu. "What, my dear, are you wearing?" said the stern teacher. She was a goat; she didn't understand dreams.

"I am following my dreams," I squeaked out. "Someday I am going to leave this barn and become a dancer!" But I could tell that my teacher didn't believe me, and she bellowed at me to stand in the corner until I realized that PIGLETS DON'T DANCE.

As I sat in that window and thought about what my teacher told me, I imagined what my life would be like if I gave up my dream and became just like every other pig in the pen. Tears flooded my face as I envisioned year after year of rolling in that filthy, rotten, stinky mud pit. I saw my tutu swallowed by inches of dust and ripped to shreds by the malicious rats that infest our barn. Just as I was at my lowest point, about ready to rip my tutu to shreds to avoid its eventual decay, I felt a large shadow billowing over me.

It was the horse that taught the grade above me. She said to me, "Not all teachers think dreams are silly. In fact, most of us feel that we are here to make sure your nightmares of living in the pen all your life do not become a reality." She wiped my face where my tear stains had made grubby streaks down my cheek and went on in her soothing voice. "This is only the first of many instances in your life when people will try to shoot down your dreams. Instead of letting them drag you down, you must rise up and fight even harder!"

"So I can be a dancer after all?" I asked as my face lit up and an energy unlike any I had ever known rose from the pit of my stomach and escaped as a loud, "YIPEE!" I strutted back to my teacher and told her that I WOULD NOT take off my tutu even if she threw my out of the barn. I sat perched with the other piglets, but my mind was far away. Away in a place where I was the star of the show in a brand new tutu.