I included this phrase in the book Beautiful Me because being fulfilled and being passionate bring
about an internal aura that is beautiful. Our dreams are what drive us. I guess
another way to look at it is your dreams are your goals. We all have them. You
can have long-term and short-term dreams you want to fulfill.
Life gets crazy sometimes. It can be confining and
constricting too, but that should never be an excuse to not dream. That is
where it starts, as a seed of an idea.
The seed to become a writer was planted when I was thirteen.
I didn’t like to read as a kid. I was a slower reader than all the other kids
in the class therefore self-assigned myself the label of a bad reader—I know
now that this not the case (more on self-assigned labels in a later post).
However, feeling like I wasn’t good at reading lead me to resist it, but I also
think, now, that I wasn’t moved by much of what was offered for me to read at
this younger age. When I was in eighth grade that changed, I discovered
historical fiction and fell in love with the genre. I finally found a book that
spoke to me and my passion and I wanted to write too. So, I picked up a pen
drafted the first page and hated every word of it—stinking self-critic. And I
stopped writing, but I didn’t stop reading.
Jump ahead, oh I don’t know, maybe ten years. I was married,
finishing a Master’s degree in education and teaching kindergarten. Loving what
I was doing, but still having a yearning for creating. In my job as a teacher I
was getting plenty of experience creating materials and designing lessons. For
the moment, I was content. The dream to write was dormant, and who was I to
even think about this when I had never excelled in my English classes??
As life continued to unravel and I changed schools and
changed schools again and changed schools again, then left the profession to
follow my husband as he pursued a career opportunity and we started a family.
It was actually between the second and third school change that I really
started to reconsider my career choice, not because I didn’t love teaching, but
because I wasn’t sure this was how my life was supposed to play out, I kept
feeling like there was something else I was supposed to be doing. But what? The
desire to write eeked to life again. My degrees were in education and I had no
idea, no authority to write a book. But it’s what I wanted.
I heard someone on the radio say if you want to change your
direction in life, then change your mind/attitude first. If you want to be a
writer, start telling people. Well, that just scared the living daylights out
of me, because I had no plan. It’s what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how
to do it and if I told people, they’d laugh or tell me it wasn’t a viable
career option especially since I was employed in the public school system with
a consistent salary and benefits and my summers off, how could I want to change
that?
Yeah, I listened to those voices in my head and kept my
dream close to my heart sharing it with no one, not even my husband. I still
remember the night I sat at the dinner table with my husband, our babies babbling
around us and told him I wanted to write a book. He smiled, kind of laughed and
then looked at my serious face and said, “Really?”
“Yes,” I said, ready to defend this sacred truth I had just
spilled to him and that I was afraid he was going to attempt to squash.
“Okay,” he said—because he is wonderful—and started helping
me to find the time—to make the time—to sit down and start writing.
Now, I’m living this writing and publishing dream. It has
been a journey to figure it all out, but now that I’ve started to explore this
experience, my dream is morphing, changing and becoming more specific. There
are more things I want to do with my writing, surrounding my writing, and
connecting with other women and entrepreneurs.
I can’t help but wonder how my journey would have been
different if I’d shared my dream, even with one person, earlier in my life.
There are no do-overs, so I don’t dwell on it, but I just wonder.
So, go on and be beautiful…follow those dreams and start by
sharing them!
I would love to hear from you. Please, share what dream you
are following. Or be bold and share what dream you are keeping close to your
heart.
