If you were to ask me about my vision for my life at 10, it might look a lot like it does today. Isn’t that amazing…the clarity you have when adult pursuits cloud your mind and you think that you have to have and do what everyone else has or does. My vision has been with- in me for a long time but I spent years fighting it.
I grew up in a Midwestern town (Nebraska if you must know) where people get marry young, have kids young, go to college to meet their husband. I was fortunate to be exposed to people, experiences, and opportunities outside of that path to help me see that that wasn’t the path for me.
The day after I graduated college I packed my car, dropped it off to my parents house and hopped a plane to NYC to start the rest of my life – shunning all that my small town represented behind.
I had an amazing internship, a great place to live, a good group of friends, and yet I was miserable. I thought I was living my vision – this place and this life that literally 4 years before that, on the day I graduated high school I wrote in my journal that I wanted – was sucking my spirit from me.
Don’t get me wrong, it was fun, I mean really fun. I believe that everyone at sometime in their life should move to some place you know NO ONE and get lost. It was – looking back – the best thing that ever happened to me.
I learned a lot from my mentor. She was working 14 hour days, had a gorgeous penthouse on the Upper West Side, was living the Sex In The City life that I had dreaSmt of for so long, and was unhappy.
Ironically, she wanted the same thing that my friends who stayed in my little town in Nebraska had – a family of her own. I was devastated. If she couldn’t be happy with all that stuff – then I didn’t know how I could ever be happy. I had shunned the idea of kids. I couldn’t imagine myself being selfless enough to have a husband. I wanted work and access and flash. She has work and access and flash, and still wasn’t happy.
I ended my internship and came home with my tail between my legs – feeling more lost than ever. I felt like I failed and I was only 22.
I took a job in Chicago working for a small nonprofit. Living there, I knew what I didn’t want, but no idea what I did. So I wrote, and watched, and was open. I cannot tell you what happened in those 4 years in the city, but I can say I came out of it with a more refined vision, less broken, and in love with a man.
Fast forward 10 years and my vision for my life is coming more in focus with every passing day. There have been moments when I question my self, like when I had my two beautiful children. But today I know who I am. Who? Well, I’m first a mother. I’m a wife, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a friend, a sister, an extrovert, and I sap. I’m a hard worker and a calculated risk taker, beer drinker, do gooder, student of everything.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an insecure woman constantly striving to understand if I’m doing the right thing. But most of all, I’m myself on my own path and very excited to what my life looks like when I slow down to be present in it and grateful to those who are a part of it, even you for reading this.
My mother told me when I got married that life will always take time, work will always rise to fill your days, but you must stop all of that to pay attention to the people and the world around you. She is so wise isn’t she?