The Story is Yours.

I have big dreams. Most of which I am too scared to even say out loud, so I keep them tucked away in my heart and in the notes section of my phone. And it seems safe there. To dream about things that seem impossible at first and make little baby steps to get there, so tiny that no one really notices until it happens. As the days get closer to one of my big real dreams coming true, I feel the anxiousness starting to creep in. The doubt and the negative self-talk. Who am I to do something like this? Who do I think I am with my elementary vocabulary and mind that swirls one hundred directions all at once? I want to be an author. Not a little author, but an author that has contracts waiting to be fulfilled and pages that can’t be read fast enough and when someone asks my children what I do, the first thing they say is that I write books. Not for fame or money, but to open eyes and hearts and because I genuinely crave writing.

So, I guess I am not close to that exact dream coming to life… but I am getting close to becoming a real-life author and that feels scary enough. It’s funny because as big as my dream is about being an author, and as excited as I am for my first book to be released, I know this isn’t the book that will get me there. I love this book. I felt like I could have never moved forward if I were still keeping secrets and holding on to hurt, and this book broke the chains that held me captive for so long. The thing is though, I don’t even want those chains a part of this side of my story. Somedays I wish my author dream could be independent of the life of the writer. That’s why I chose a pen name, to separate the new author me from the old me. I know she (the book, Mended) is actually just as big of a piece, if not bigger than any other piece of my author career, but I’m ready to get the next step.

As much as I want to fight it, the girl who wrote Mended is the same girl that’s in my dream of being a “real” author. I am not saying this to undermine any of the growth that I have done in the past 5 years, because that growth is something big… but I will always have pieces of the broken girl I write about in Mended. Yes, I have changed. A lot. I have grown. A lot. I have worked through and moved past trauma that I thought I would carry with me forever. I have no anger, no confusion, just peace. But there are days that life still seems so heavy and I become the girl right out of Chapter 4 all over again.

Chapter 4 was about accepting the transition- those seasons of life that you feel stuck half in a place that you have outgrown, but not quite ready for the next part of you that requires a newer version of yourself. That’s where I find myself a lot of days. I am the dreamer and the dreams are getting closer to becoming reality, yet I am stuck in the overwhelm of the part of me that is yearning to be the past version of me, but it’s still my present. That’s the me that’s afraid. When I’m afraid, I wallow in self pity, sadness, and I get so anxious that my favorite parts of life seem so mundane that I crave an escape. While the days are much, much rarer than they once were, I still have days that all of those weigh so much on me that I run to the only things I know to give me escape, yet eventually it will pull me closer to them than I initially was.

I don’t know if this resonates with anyone but me, but I stay in my head sometimes, fighting myself. I know what this part of life is about; the transition. But there’s two ways to take the transition, and I don’t want either one. I can take the easy way and run to food and wine for relief and escape like I know how to do. But that means ill stay forever stuck in that part of myself that I want to claim as the past. Or I can rise up and do the work to step into the next version of myself- the hard path.

So if you don’t know which path I have chosen, then I should tell you that writing is part of the hard path. I am going to write and feel the suckiness of it all again until the uncomfort of growth becomes a new normal. I know that the fear, angst, and the hatred I have for myself is just the devil trying to keep me here, or even worse, pull me back to who I once was. I know I have God on my side, and with Him comes love, peace, and worth. That’s where my faith comes in. I have to do the work on my end and follow in blind obedience to be the woman that allows herself to not only dream, but follow the dream. While I am not a Bible study writer, a theologian, or even write about God in every post, I know that my writing is what I was created to do. Having hope through hardship is who I am & what I write about. Even though it is scary and I let my self doubt and worthlessness creep in sometimes, im ready to get past this transition and step into the next season of life.

So here I am God. Writing. The story is yours.