Are you chasing the WRONG dream?

When I was five years old, I wrote a book.

It was called “The Wunders of Love” (possibly with more spelling errors) and, I’m pretty sure it featured an illustrated cover with a gorgeous circle-headed couple standing in the ocean. My mom brought it to school and showed it to my kindergarten teacher. I remember all the class moms oohing and ahhing and making a fuss over me, and thinking it was pretty cool to write books.

And while this was obviously a prodigious start, I think I went through a few other career/life dreams (veterinarian, physical therapist, crayon-color-namer) before I finally settled on the true longing of my heart: to become a published author.

I carried this dream with me through high school, where I fell in love with sentence diagramming and Latin roots, secretly loved taking the Advanced Placement English test, and lived for the forty minutes of Friday writing group time in my 12th grade English class.

I took it with me to college, where I majored in Writing & Literature, dabbled in short stories, and wrote both my first novella and a screenplay.

But I was scared to write a book.

Chasing big dreams can do that to you–it can petrify you, freeze you up right at the core.

And so even though I knew it would be the easiest thing in the world to sit down and start writing words, it was also the hardest thing.

The year my husband started medical school I started working in earnest. It was still scary. I got halfway through writing my second-ish novel (I wrote one in high school that will probably never see the light of day), and realized that I didn’t like it. I resented it. So I scrapped it and started something new.

That one I loved. I poured myself into it, and the more I wrote, the more the characters shifted and changed. The plot arced without me, twisting into new iterations of itself and spiraling tighter and tighter towards becoming fully realized.

But the better the story got, the harder the writing became.

I was struggling with a consuming, untreated clinical depression.

I carried two more little ones through difficult pregnancies and was suddenly a mother of two, then three.

I was bad at saying no when someone (anyone) needed help.

My sweetheart, in medical training, was gone a lot, which meant I was part-time single-parenting. (More on survival-mode parenting, here!)

We’d moved almost 2,500 miles from our family.

My best friend’s husband graduated, and they moved away.

I was tired down to my bones, and I was pushing too hard.

But I wanted to prove myself.

I could do this. I could write a book and get it published. And if I wanted to do that, I would just have to give up my time–and myself, maybe–to do it.

I wrote 147,980 words. And then, one day, I stopped.

It wasn’t finished.

It was getting closer, but it was still very far away. I told myself I needed to step back and do it for the right reasons. I would only write it on the days I wanted to write it, and that would make it better. That would make it fulfilling instead of diminishing.

And as I paged slowly through the days that followed, I realized:

I didn’t want to write it.

I’d committed myself to this dream–a dream I chose probably more than fifteen years ago (are you trying to do the math? I’m thirty. ;). But the thing is, even though that is probably still a dream for “future-Jamie” to tackle someday, I’ve realized that the thing I’ve proclaimed all my life to be “my dream” is not my dream.

Not right now.

Right now my dream is to be happy, and have time to play. It’s to make the must-dos simpler and smaller so I can explore the things I want to do. Like draw, and braid my six-year-old’s hair, and lay on the carpet in a square of sunshine while my toddler crawls all over me.

My dream is to search for myself in the beautiful everyday things that I loved but gave up to fit what I thought I had to be.

My dream is to reach out to mamas who need a boost, a tip, and a friend.

My dream is to write here. To create here. To see what else I’m capable of.

I don’t want to travel somewhere new and exotic to find myself; I want to be in my life now and find myself here.

What about you, mama?

Are you struggling to fit into the mold of “who you are”? The girl you created when you were in high school or college? Are you pursuing a dream you don’t even want, because you feel like you have to prove yourself?

There is so much pressure to do more and be more. So much pressure to “never give up” and “never quit.” To be SUPERMOM. To push harder when you already feel stretched beyond your very real limits.

Today I want to ask you to take a step back, and really look at what you’re doing.

Does your life look like you want it to?

Is there something that’s sucking the energy and hope out of you, so you have nothing left to give to your children, husband, and self?

Is the “dream” you’ve always thought was your one-and-only aspiration still the dream you want to chase right now?

If it’s not…

Think about what you really want.

Think about your vision for your family. Your vision for yourself.

And think about what needs to get cut out, trimmed down, or quitted to get there.

It might make you feel a little vulnerable, but it will be worth it.

Pinky promise.

xo,
Jamie

p.s. If you’ve found your real dream, but you’re still waiting for “your turn” to follow it and a few things I didn’t know were missing until I hit rock bottom.

top and bottom images by Florian Klauer