When Your Reality Still Feels Unreal: Stepping into the Newest Versions of Ourselves

I remember being in the hospital after my daughter was born. After an extended stay, due to a slightly unexpected c-section, I remember holding my baby when the doctor came in and told us we could go home the next morning.

I started crying.

How could they let me take a baby home?

I understood that technically speaking I was in fact a mom. However, I felt overwhelmed and underqualified for the job of actually taking my beautiful baby girl home and really, truly becoming a mother.

Yet the next morning came, and they still insisted that it was time to leave.

While we bundled our baby up and brought her home, fearing every other car on the road and every bump we bounced over, we slowly began to grow into our roles as parents.

It wasn’t an overnight realization or an instant success, and still to this day I still find moments where I say to myself “I am really a Mom.”

Usually after I am struck in awe at something inspiring or loving or completely unexpected that my children said or did.

We weren’t given a manual on how to proceed. On how to be parentish or mom-like. It is something we kind of just figured out. We figured it out by following our instincts, our intuition, and taking what felt like the next right step.

I have found myself standing in a similar place this year.

I have found myself thinking “writing a book doesn’t make me an author. I am not an author.”
But technically speaking - I am.

Yet with every bookstore I visit to drop off books, every podcast I record, every event I attend I still find myself feeling like “this isn’t really my reality.”

Much like becoming a Mom, I have dreamed of becoming an author for so long. Dreamed of inspiring others not by telling them what to do or how to think, but rather by sharing my own thoughts - the good and the ugly - and hoping that my words help another feel like they aren’t taking this journey alone.

Yet standing in the reality of it somehow leaves me feeling like I am dreaming or even not worthy of the title. Not worthy of the reality of a dream come true.

I think we often hit a milestone, have a dream come true, find ourselves on the edge of everything we ever wanted - and not knowing what to do with it.

Nearly rejecting it before we even have time to relish in it.

The truth is that the moment our dream arrives - whether it is a new baby, the promotion we have been waiting for, the dream job, the dream house, the dream location, the dream relationship.
The arrival is only the beginning.

It is the growing into your dreams when our new reality really begins to form.

It is the leaning in to both the responsibility and the blessings of our wish fulfillment when the real becoming happens.

I wonder how many opportunities we are given that we end up walking away from - scared of or in disbelief that we couldn’t possibly be that person who receives such a chance experience.

A change in reality isn’t an overnight change.

It is the conscious choice over and over again to keep following the directions we are being called.
To not just have a baby. But to become a Mom.

To not just write a book. But to continue to share my voice. To be the author not just of my words, but of my new reality.

So, the next time you find yourself on the edge of a brand-new version of you.
Relish in the fact that this new adventure is just getting started.

It takes time to step out of the old versions of you and into the all of you that you are becoming.

It’s not the destination, or the title, or the initial accomplishment that holds the joy.

It is the journey. The evolution of you.

Embrace. Evolve. Wrap yourself up in the knowing that you made it this far.
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And the best is everything that you will become as you continue to boldly step into the new.

The Vulnerable Me.