There is a part of me that still wants to be on a stage.
She is twelve years old.
She is all singing, all dancing, all theatre.
She believes life should be dramatic, expressive, visible, and full of applause.
She doesn’t quite understand me right now.
She looks at the shape my life is taking and says,
What is this? Why are we here? This is not what we were meant to do.
And she isn’t wrong.
But she doesn’t yet know what I know.
She hasn’t lived through what I’ve lived through.
She hasn’t learned what I’ve learned about people, pain, care, or what it means to sit with real human stories.
She doesn’t yet carry the questions that now live in me.
I am still her.
But I am also the woman she couldn’t imagine becoming.
The woman who believes the world needs care.
The woman who wants to do work that is meaningful, not performative.
The woman who is drawn to presence, to listening, to making meaning.
(And yes, I’m on the edge of stepping into something new)
Somehow, both of these selves are still true.
One of them longs to create and express.
The other longs to understand and accompany.
One wants to be seen.
The other wants to see.
What’s surprising me lately is not what I’m doing,
but what I’m drawn toward:
Work that happens with in people, quiet and unseen.
Life that unfolds through conversation, not performance.
Ways of being that allow creativity and care to exist side by side.
It feels aligned, not with a fantasy version of myself,
but with the person I actually am now.
There is something quietly profound about being trusted with real moments, real stories, real lives.
About belonging to spaces where connection matters.
Where doing something worthwhile is a shared desire, not a lonely ambition.
Maybe this is what it means to grow into yourself.
Not to abandon who you were…
but to let her mature.
To take the expressiveness of that twelve-year-old
and give it depth.
To take her imagination and give it gravity.
To take the dream
and give it roots.
When life doesn’t look like the dream,
but feels like the truth,
it can be tempting to think we’ve settled.
But perhaps what we’ve done is integrate.
We’ve let experience shape us.
We’ve let suffering soften us.
We’ve let time teach us what matters.
And instead of becoming impressive,
we’ve become more human.
If you are at odds with a version of yourself, remind them that life
may not look like the dream…
but it feels like the truth.