The I'm Possible List: Clearly, I Want to do More Than 5 Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Kids make wish lists before Christmas. Hopefully not just ones made up of links on Amazon, although I wouldn’t know - I’m just discovering that there are apps that deliver alcohol at 3 AM. Kids make wish lists all the time. The average toddler asks 300 questions a day, but I swear they start more than 300 sentences a day with “I wanna,” or “Someday I’m gonna.” It gives me hope that most adults have a wish list too. Besides that one filled with expensive headphones, wedding table-runners, flats in SOHO. A dream list. Bucket lists, we call them.

But, dreams don’t belong in buckets. Buckets are great for holding soapy water when you’re mopping. 

Speaking of buckets and soapy water, I’m allergic to Windex. Whenever I get it on my skin, I end up with a massive red rash that itches like crazy, drives me up the wall, and doesn’t look the least bit sexy. Now, usually, this Windex doesn’t get all over me. It stays in a bucket with sudsy water. But occasionally, the bucket will tip over, or the bottle will spray weird, and I’ll end up covered in soap and then with a burning desire to itch my skin off. What if we treated our dreams like we treat our allergies to dish soap? I’m dumping my Bucket List and making an Itch List.

Things I’ve always been itching to try, things I can’t get out of my head, desires that are hard to calm, those topics I want to jabber endlessly about to someone. Perhaps when desires stop being watery drops of sudsy, vague, unclear ideas that reside in a bucket and start being burning, impossible to ignore, occasionally frustrating itches, I’ll finally stop being so patient, and just scratch. A little Rash decision making is good sometimes.

One of my favourite terms in modern psychology is "imposter syndrome." 

Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience) is a concept describing individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a "fraud".

Clearly I'm not talking about real impostors here, (although I hope whoever made that gloriously sketchy fake-Masha Instagram account is having oodles of fun.) I'm referring more to the fear we all get that: at any moment, just when we think it's all just dandy and we're on top of the world and our little heads are spinning with the kind of surrealism that only comes with accomplished goals (or a bit of LSD,) the no-talent police are going to come up and arrest us at any moment. "Excuse me, what exactly do you think you're doing? Mind if we ask you a few questions?" The Stop-And-Frisk of Dream City. 

I'm about as far away from alone in this as one can get, but a funny thing starts to happen when parts of one's life get documented, either in photos or in writing - the person, or character, in them slowly gets less and less real. You see, occasionally I'll look at my own crappy creation of a life documentary and feel an inexplicable urge to be the girl in those stories or in those photos. I get asked quite often whether any of the things I say I do, or like to do, are even "real." Almost as if I've been asked to raise my arms and stand to face a wall.

You know, for someone who says she likes wandering around the Metropolitan and climbing trees, you have awfully few photos of that. All your pictures are of you being bold and bougie - and you're not even cool enough to listen to rap.

And I understand that fully. I can look through all of my photos, and I'm almost ever smiling. Even as a proudly-identified Asshole-New-Yorker and Scary-Slav, it's a bit off putting. But, you see, so many of the things that make Masha smile are pretty darn hard to photograph. Masha loves running through the rain; I don't know about you, but the rain turns my iphone camera to shit. Who on earth wants low-quality flash-heavy images of midnight sneaking around construction sites? (I'd also rather not drop my phone in an attempt to take one.) Spinning around under starry skies, wandering around art galleries, and painting the sunset are fun. They stop being fun the second you awkwardly hand your phone to a stranger, look at the ground, and ask : "Hey, can you take a photo?" Most of my mornings start with cozy cuddles with my law textbooks, watching the sunset. Sorry, but they like to keep our romance private. No point in taking selfies documenting Friday nights that make the world curvy - Big Babushka's sometimes watching after all. 

See, Snapchat Spectacles and Google Glass didn't quite pan out as investments, but there are certain times when I watch Masha through some sort of camera-donning, surreal spectacles. I'm sure we all do the same. Impossible glasses. I'm Possible Glasses. "Eye'm Possible Eyewear," with a side of a slap for pathetic wordplay. 

So here it is, an very much in-progress list of things I'd like to watch Masha do someday. Now, I'm off to go make some tea, and pray that that girl doesn't snap her stilettos. 

(Yes, I'm aware that a lot of these could qualify as pretentious, pie-in-the-sky, overly-ambitious, and ridiculous. All complaints can be sent to me, where they will be read by a five year old who sees no problem with setting dreams this way.)

Writing/ Words

• Hit 10,000 views on blog
• Publish Physical Book
• Take a photo in a bookstore where a book I've written is being sold
• Publish an article in a non-college-affiliated magazine or newspaper
• Give a Ted-X talk
• Get off my butt and apply to one of those essay-contest things. 

Fashion/Modeling

• Participate in New York Fashion Week
• NYFW Catwalk
• Publish again in editorial print magazine (It's been too long, aim for recency.)
• Music video

Art

• Buy painting at a legitimate New York art auction
• Find a way to support local artists that I really care about
• Illustrate part of a published book
• Go back to art school
• Study art in a foreign country
• Participate in New York graffiti mural

Travel and Adrenaline

• Get on a plane again (finally able to after restoring health!)
• Visit country besides US and homeland (Russia)
• Climb mountain with 3000 foot elevation change from base 
• Climb mountain with 5000 foot elevation change from base
• Take a quokka selfie
• Go scuba diving
• Skydiving
• Bungee Jumping
• Spend a month living on a boat
• Do CN tower edge walk

Fitness and Athletics

• Climb 20 foot rope using only my arms
• Do 15 pull ups in a set
• Do a muscle up
• Land my back full again
• Double backflip on competitive trampoline
• Get my middle split
• Run a Real Sponsored Bib-And-T-Shirt 10k, not just in training on track field (Why, I don't know, but why not?)
• Standing needle
• Get a parkour trick cool enough to warrant the embarrassment of asking someone to film it
• Become a certified yoga instructor

Uncategorized

• Leave a 100 dollar tip for a waiter who really deserves it
• Go on another meditation reatreat
• Find a way to give back to my parents for not giving up on me (no idea if this will ever be quantifiable, but let's throw it on there.)
• Become competent at figure skating
• Graduate college 
• Finish Freshman Year with a high GPA
• Meet John and Hank Green
• Meet Seth Godin
• Meet Dan Ariely
• Graduate Stuyvesant High School (COMPLETED)

For an updated, running, current version of this list, see "I'm Possible List page)

https://masha-fomitchova.squarespace.com/im-possible-list/