The Waiting is the Hardest Part

when you've embarked on a new dream and suddenly you're SO tempted to quit

Once upon a time, a friend of mine had a dream. She’d had it since childhood. And while she worked at her corporate job, while she raised her child as a single mom, while she skipped vacations and instead paid off her house (leaves always raked, gutters always cleaned), she snuggled into her dream like a cozy lifeboat: to be an artist.

She had postponed her dream when she got pregnant in college and during the years it took to leave an abusive marriage and then recover her sense of self-worth.

But she had a dream and in her late 40’s, her ducks were in a row. She was finally ready. She enrolled in art school. We threw her a party.

She quit after one week.

She offered various reasons (everyone is so young, it’s too hot in the studio, the instruction is too basic).

But you wanted this for so very long, we said. But you worked so hard. You gave up so much.

There is a passage we must all traverse when we’re going after a new dream.

The bigger the dream and the longer we’ve waited, the more perilous this passage can be.

Because we’ve loaded our dream with so much of who we’ve always hoped we’d become. So much deferred us-ness.

We venture down the long imagined path and maybe we’re all good, singing and skipping, or maybe we panic and before we know it, we’re back doing the same old. The exceedingly familiar. We may not even know we are fleeing because our minds are so good at convincing us that going back, starting again in say a month, yes, or a couple of months, that’s the better choice.

If you’ve interrupted a long-held dream like my friend did — and me! — there’s no reason to feel shame. Change is not linear. Dipping a toe in “I want this” counts. You learn and change by doing anything toward what calls you. It all adds up if we let it. If we honor our experiences and draw on that knowledge.

But if you, like me, have dipped your toe in and sprinted away because the water seemed too damn cold and now you tell yourself it’s too late to try again, I’m going to ask you, with so much love, “Are you sure?”

Because believing it’s too late can easily be a way to hide from what’s calling you to more life. New life.

My experience with all this

I’ve wanted to write fiction since high school. I started off as a screenwriter and when I didn’t have instant success like some of my film school peers, I became depressed. Out of that first why bother it’s too late time came my first book The Woman’s Comfort Book and with it, success and a career as a personal growth writer, and later speaker, coach, and teacher.

I’m very proud of my three decades of empowering women but I’m also sad that, while I kept giving fiction a try, I also kept giving up. Like when my agent read the first 40 pages of my novel and called to say, “You are a wonderful writer but I do not like your main character.” I never went back and revised that novel.

I just quit. Without even knowing I quit. (Writing that I want to go take a nap, it’s so hard to face.) My novel faded into the background.

Here I am twenty-three years later (now I really really want to take a nap, that’s a big number friends) a 1/3 of the way through a new novel and I’m slowly learning to be someone who can embody my dream.

How is that happening? For starters, I don’t care about creating a new identity as a novelist. I care about the daily craft, the characters, the learning how to put all these pieces together. All those years ago, I cared more about becoming someone cooler, someone who could join the literary club (say that in a very snotty voice). It’s mortifying to admit that but there you have it.

Maybe part of what helps us stay with our dream until it either takes hold or we realize it’s not for us — totally legit and extremely important to shed what no longer resonates but you have to explore long enough to know — is devotion to the craft of the dream rather than an eye on what it might get us.

Or maybe it’s patience. Looking back I can see I wanted my new writing life to unfold like a romance novel - you decide “This is my dream! I’ll do anything to make it happen!” and you move to an island, and ta-da! Two days/weeks/months later, you’re in love with your soul mate, own the local bookstore/herb emporium/tea shop, and have written a best-selling novel.

Let me assure you, you don’t need to move to an island. I know because I actually did it. I both did not finish my novel and I had to deal with the damn ferry.

Maybe it’s also about learning to believe in what you are doing. My client the lovely and wise Marika Paez Wiesen who writes the wonderful newsletter The In-Between Times said,

“I keep thinking about how when you want to manifest your life partner, people say you should clear off literal space on your shelf and a drawer for that person’s things. Most people would think that’s crazy, but the brain can’t see the future, it only has information from your PAST. Not that helpful when you’re trying to create something that’s never previously EXISTED. So there’s a tension between desire and belief?”

I felt that tension so much in the first months of writing this novel. I had to will myself to keep believing I could show up and write. I feel it in my clients when they are early in the process of writing their books. I have to hold the belief for them until they can feel it themselves. We phrase it as “What am I thinking? Who do I think I am?” when perhaps the better question is “Who am I becoming and how can I become that through taking action today?”

This is such a juicy topic I could write all day but instead, over to you. Please consider commenting (just hit the comment button below if you are reading this in an email) and tell this kind community what dream you are living into and what, if anything, is dragging you backward or making you doubt. Yes, this might be scary to declare but I’ll be it will also be extremely helpful. Because community matters when we are walking into a new dream.

Click this button and share your dream.

Love,

Jen