Series: The Beauty of Being Limited
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be everything.
A Major League Baseball player—to impress my Grandpa. I’d be the first woman in history to play on a pro team, and he would be so proud.
A model—to impress the world. Seventeen magazine told me that to be successful, I needed to be skinny and sexy—like a picture, more than a person.
A writer… always a writer. Surrounded by piles of books and papers, pen in my mouth, breathing in the ether and scribbling down the magic in my mind. That has always been my truth.
But dreaming, I was told, was cute—until it wasn’t.
“You can’t do that.”
“No one’s ever done that.”
“You won’t make money.”
“Be realistic.”
So I learned to trade imagination for achievement. I stopped dreaming big and started performing well.
Somewhere along the line, I wasn’t a person anymore—I was a role.
A wife. A mother. A lady. A team player.
All polished and approved. Respectable. Predictable.
And yet… none of it left space for the wild, curious, creative self I housed under the masks.
The unraveling didn’t happen all at once.
It came in flickers—quiet moments that didn’t quite fit.
My body sitting at a meeting while my mind screamed in the voice of a child, “No! I don’t want to be here.”
Staring into the fridge, not hungry—just empty.
Lying next to someone I no longer knew how to talk to.
Looking around at the mess, the marriage, the motions of a life that looked fine from the outside—
and thinking, Why am I doing this? Any of this?
At first, I thought the problem was me.
I wasn’t enough to fill the roles expected of me.
Everyone else seemed to flow just fine in the monotonous void of life—juggling roles like seasoned improv teams—while I was secretly gasping for air.
Stuck underwater. Tired of treading.
The truth?
It was me. Just not in the way I thought.
There was nothing wrong with me.
The roles I was choosing were wrong for me.
I wasn’t broken. I was just trying to shrink myself into a life I didn’t want.
A life I thought I should want.
A life society handed to me, pre-approved and shrink-wrapped in absurd expectations.
It took a near-death experience to jolt me awake.
I was in a hospital bed, two young kids at home getting ready for Halloween.
I was told—bluntly—that I needed open-heart surgery, or I would die.
And just like that, time became real.
Not abstract. Not endless.
Real.
I had already made peace with the idea that I might not leave that hospital in my body.
But something in me wasn’t ready to go—not like that.
Not having lived someone else’s idea of a life.
Not without ever fully living my own.
So I changed everything.
I left the marriage I had been quietly disappearing in.
I fell in and out of love—in a way that cracked me open.
I lived alone for the first time.
I picked up old hobbies like sacred artifacts.
I wrote. I wandered. I remembered who I was.
The self I had silenced for so long finally stepped forward, blinking in the light.
Not with a whisper, but with a dare:
Now or never.
Now, I live differently. Not perfectly. Not always gracefully.
But truthfully.
I no longer shape myself to fit roles—I shape my life to fit me.
Success isn’t about titles or income or praise.
It’s about authenticity.
My sparkle lives in creativity. My joy comes from curiosity.
I find glimmers in small, sacred things:
a good sentence, a strange conversation, a moment of wonder when the world stops spinning and just is.
I no longer want the life I was told to want.
I want mine. The real one.
The messy, magical, meaning-soaked life that doesn’t always make sense but always feels like home in my bones.
The one where I don’t perform. I exist.
Where I don’t check boxes. I follow sparks.
Where I don’t shrink. I bloom.
And if you’re still living a story someone else wrote for you—
maybe it’s time to pick up the pen.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
– Mary Oliver
Reflection Prompt:
What part of your current life was built on someone else’s expectations—and what part is waiting for you to reclaim it?