What do you want to be AFTER you grow up?

Most kids are asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and to a child, there is no dream too big.  When we’re children, we don’t put limits on ourselves, which is why you often hear: I want to be an astronaut, the President, a magical unicorn pony.  Why not?  When I was a kid, my expectations for myself weren’t quite so high.  I wanted to be wild and foot loose and fancy free.  And I was.

I rode that dream well into my twenties.  Not to say that my dreams as a child included alcohol abuse (they didn’t) but I drank way too much anyway.  I dropped out of school and I continued to make really poor decisions.  I had a serious disdain for all types of authority and I burned a lot of bridges.  I lived that “dream” until it eventually became a nightmare and I finally decided to pinch myself awake.  The world looked different then.  What was my dream now? 

I had babies.  Although I had (and still have) moments of pure profound joy with my children every single day, I did suffer from post-partum depression and OCD.  My hormones went berserk and my brain was overrun with overwhelming thoughts that something horrible was going to happen to my children; the most common of them being: they are going to stop breathing in their sleep, they’re going to slip from my arms as I walk down the steps. In a moment of pure exhaustion, I am going to run a red light with them in the back seat of the car, I am going to get plowed and they are going to die and I will be left to live the rest of my miserable life locked inside a padded cell in a mental institution.  I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, I cried in a lot of corners, and I climbed a lot of walls.  My life started to feel like one big bad acid trip.  I went to the doctor and he told me to take a chill pill—a real one, like Valium, not a figurative one.

In a moment of drug induced calm, when I was finally able to stop my mind from strategizing about how to fight a bear if ever one tried to threaten my children’s lives (this is how unreasonable I had become) I made a decision to just stop—stop the freaking madness.  It wasn’t easy and it still isn’t easy.

But who I am today is someone who knows that it’s okay to start over; to revisit yourself as a child and ask a new question: “What do you want to be AFTER you grow up?”   When I took the time to reconnect with my authentic self, I looked little me in those big sad eyes, hugged her like she was my own daughter and a small voice inside me said, “I just want to be me.  I want to be courageous and strong, and I want to write about it.”  No limits.  Our dreams are ever evolving, just like we are, and it’s okay to start over.