I am beautiful when I follow my dreams…

What is your dream? Are you living it? Are you on a path to living it?

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.