A Beautiful New Chapter

I have a dream, and now I'm going after it

After my brother died, I struggled to dream.

I was 22, and I didn’t see the point.

What was the point of pursuing my final Fulbright scholarship interview rounds or imagining a future career—when someone I loved was gone?

My whole being was wrapped in the pain of impermanence. Everything changes. Everything we love will eventually be lost—sometimes far sooner than we think. What place did dreaming have inside these truths? Why invest in a carefully orchestrated future when life so often unravels?

Especially when, sometimes, it unravels in more catastrophic ways than we could ever anticipate.

And maybe, beneath the sheer struggle to survive, there was a deeper reason:

I was afraid of having more to lose.

Almost fourteen years have passed since then, along with a lot of healing. I found my way back to dreaming. I found a way to hold the future lightly, yet with passion. I’ve found reasons to invest in growth, exploration, and even mystery.

This dreaming has led to so many beautiful things:

A values-aligned place to live; a wonderful partner; a book about well-being; touring a one-woman play; nine years of a thriving creative business; a new role as mother; so many projects that I’m proud of, and relationships I’m even prouder of.

And now—a new chapter. A new dream. One that took a long time to form, a quiet seed in my heart, and when it finally did, it caught fire and burst forth into an oak tree.

Finally today, I was able to take the first outward gesture of crossing the threshold of this dream.

I submitted my first book query to an agent.

Two years of devotion, distilled into a single email. Time spent ideating, drafting, interviewing, editing, integrating feedback, deleting and rewriting, researching agents, building book proposals and query letters.

As I prepared to hit “send,” all of that work swelled behind me in an unexpected rush of gratitude. I laughed as tears filled my eyes.

I’m grateful that I still get to dream.

This project is one I’m deeply passionate about. And while I am very proud to be an indie author of my first book, I knew I wanted to reach for something else this time.

That one email is the first of almost a hundred to come.

A new chapter has begun. And while it might be a long road, it feels like joy—joy to try new things; joy to give myself permission to dream, and then act on it.

I know now, deep in my bones: we don’t dream so we can formulate a perfect future untouched by life’s truths. We dream so that life can whisk us to places we never could have imagined. And the journey of discovering where that is?

That’s what it means to be alive.

I know, as his spirit wraps around me, that my brother is so proud to watch it all unfold.

Dreaming is for the living.

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If you want to see the video of me sending off the first two queries, it’s here. Keep dreaming, friends!