“Babe, I’m just honored to witness you grow and change and become the person you’re becoming.”
Fear driven, deeply not wanting to repeat past patterns I came to my husband late at night with my concerns.
I don’t know about you but I have this notoriously bad habit with bringing things up at the absolute worst time. It feels a little bit like I have vomit in me. I have to spit it out.
In some ways that desire is a gift. The road has been long to learn how to not sacrifice what I want to please others. But, in some ways I recognize it’s not respectful to my husband who is exhausted most evenings.
Going down this road myself to make a beautiful life, one I deeply desire and not the one I’ve been told to have, has lead me to dreaming a lot about a future.
In the past I’d dream and live with second thoughts to my loved ones. As I’m looking at others in these adjacent lives I see the loneliness in so much of them. The celebrities, the authors, those famous. So much of their lives revolves around their success, their work and not existing with their loved ones. Yet others still just exist with their families. And both feel like too much sacrifice that I’ve been ravenous to extricate from my life.
Also, I’ve been there before: doing what you love but at the sacrifice of your beloved, your children, your friends.
My early twenties were filled with some beautiful success as a mountain elopement photographer. I’d been published. I had connections with epic venues. I had vendors who loved working with me. Clients raved about my work. I was traveling across the state of Colorado to my favorite places on earth: the mountains. I was getting paid to be at people’s happiest days, capturing beauty in beauty. It was such a bliss state for me.
As a lot of beautiful things can do to us, we become obsessed. Every conversation I ever wanted to have was about my work. I wanted more approval. I craved more attention for this passion of mine. My ego was wanting to be pet from every single corner of my life.
It alienated me from so many people because I didn’t know how to connect very well unless it was about my passions, my work, my obsessions.
All of it came crashing down in 2016 when I started to get really sick and eventually unable to even hold a camera.
Yet, I didn’t learn my lesson. I ran to the next thing to try to fulfill my next big break.
It’s seven years later now and I’ve grown so much. Deep in me I still have these amazing passions which aren’t dopamine driven by ego. They are the truest parts of me that imagines a more beautiful future than the one many of us exist in.
Do you want to hear the most amazing discovery I found about it all? It’s closer than we think.
Illnesses brought me the humility I needed. The empathy to understand others I lacked because of the ways I choose to survive in the world. It was a good way to exist to hide the pain I’d experienced. But, when you can no longer find your value in your doing because you literally cannot “do” anything but exist. You get faced with a whole different reality.
The past seven years have been the hardest of my life but also the most magical because I finally found myself. I gave myself everything I ever needed. I’m letting go of everything I’ve been given that I don’t want. I’m finally stepping into who I want to be.
With it has come this deep soul diving into what I want my beautiful future to be.
I’ve imagined it. Each day how I want to feel into every moment, how I want to spend my time, where I want to spend my time, who I want to spend my time with. But there were gaps. Gaps of places where I wanted to be with my husband and they were empty.
We’ve been in a chapter were some of our normal ways of connecting have been hindered because of illnesses. We’re learning how to exist without them and remember our connection is what we make it, not just the things we do together.
Yet, in all my dreaming planning we haven’t dreamed together. In a fear driven state I exploded in midnight agony: “what are our plans?!”
While I believe dreaming together is so important, in the sweet sleepiness of my husband he gently uttered “Babe, I’m just honored to witness you grow and change and become the person you’re becoming.”
Later it hit me, this this is exactly what a beautiful relationship is. Witnessing each other. Growing along side each other. Standing in awe. Something he’s been teaching me since the day we meet. We he too stood in awe of me.
I feel as if a lot of life is learning to remember we are creators and how to equally stand in awe.