The Truth About Romanticizing The Life You Don't Yet Have
i am not living a dream
no
it is so much more
i am living
a life
As someone who has struggled with excessive overthinking and low confidence, I have been one of those people who chronically feels that the grass is greener on the other side. From the awkward tween years all the way through my twenties, I remember feeling like I was never being enough, doing enough or seeing enough. I understand the feeling of lack within oneself and within one’s life. And until recently (praise the thirties) I haven’t known what it feels like to not feel that way.
Over the past two years, I’ve been fortunate enough to have two monumental dreams come true:
Become a mother
Travel internationally with my family
Before these things happened, I romanticized them to no end. And with each dream come true, I realized a commonality: Achieving and doing them has been way harder than I thought it would be. There is a real and raw factor to living out your dreams.
Since returning home from Portugal (see previous posts), I have felt a massive shift. On a walk in the woods the other day, I tried to pinpoint what the feeling was and I realized that the thick cloud of lack had evaporated above me. The people who I’ve been jealous of, felt inferior to, the alternate lives I’ve dreamed up for myself, the longing for what I don’t have, it all just rose up and floated away.
I don’t know if this is a temporary post-travel mental glow up or a true upgrade to stay, but this feeling is helping me understand something so incredibly important, especially when it comes to romanticizing: Everyone is living a life.
An obvious statement, but if you sit and really let it sink in, it becomes profound. Everyone is living a life. Everyone is living a life. Everyone is living a life. Everyone. Is. Living. A. Life.
As you and I both know, life is both beautiful and brutal. It sometimes feels incredibly magical and serene and other times impossible and painful. And sometimes a confusing combination. This newfound realization is letting me see that there is nothing to be jealous of. There is nothing I am lacking. Because, I am just living my life.
Like you and the people I passed in the airport and those who I always thought had some sort of secret ingredient. We’re all just living lives.
We’re all here. Breathing. Facing what’s ours to face. Figuring it out.
To romanticize what you don’t yet have is like believing that the air you breathe is made up of different compounds than the air somewhere else.
I’ll end with a little story, you know, to bring it all home… When I was pregnant with my daughter, I dreamed of taking her strawberry picking. I romanticized this beautiful scene of me, barefoot in the strawberry patch with my sleeping baby against my chest in a soft cloth carrier. And you know what? That did happen. And, it was also so much more. It was my sweat. Her tears when she woke up. My physical discomforts of being postpartum and squatting to pluck the berries with her additional weight on me (if you know you know). It was the juggling of keys, a blank check, a pen, and the strawberry containers with a baby strapped to the front of me. It was finagling her into the carrier from the carseat, without waking her up. It was the extreme heat of the mid-summer day and the lightheadedness I felt with my new metabolism from breastfeeding. It was what I had romanticized and so much more.
I’m living a life and so are you. And so is the person you sometimes stalk on social media because something about them and their life just seems so much better. None of us are exempt from life. We all face things. We all are given things. We all are doing it. So give a kind nod to the next person you see, let them in on the secret with a smile. A smile that says, I’m living a life and so are you.
P.S. I’m not on social media and rely on the growth of this community to spread through word of mouth! I invite you to join if you haven’t already (scroll down) and share with someone in your life who would also enjoy. Thank you!
