Today I Woke Up

Today I woke up.  Not the “oh, yawn I’m so sleepy” kind of wake up.  It was the “hit your head, coulda had a V-8, what was I thinking” kind of wake up.  I woke up from a dream…or perhaps it was a nightmare.

This dream I concocted was a love story gone wrong.  The dream was a love denied and the heroine (me) unjustly ripped from the true love of my life.  This dream (jury still out on nightmare idea) was tucked under the rug in my heart for the last two years of my life.  This dream was annoying since I kept tripping over the bump it created in the rug.  Every time I tripped, I would fall and scrape my knee.  Every time I tripped, I would fall emotionally back into the dream.  And every time I fell back into the dream, it would reinvent itself.  So this dream was very vivid and in complete Technicolor.  The problem was, this dream was not real but I believed it was. And because I believed it to be real, I never lifted up the rug and swept it away.

 The dream begins as all fairy tales do, once upon a time.  Once upon a time, I met a man.  He was smart, communicative, and had amazingly beautiful eyes.  This man and I hit it off with that “once in a lifetime” feeling swirling around us both.  The problem was this man had flags.  I am not talking about one very small, triangle shaped flag.  I’m talking about those warning flags they set up on beaches when the waves are as big as a building.  While I saw the flags waving in my face and even told myself I would never get involved with this man, it was too late.  It was too late because I had summoned him to me.  How?  Easy, I uttered the phrase, “I am through with men.”  I then further cemented his arrival by stating, “I only want to find a man that loves me exactly as I am.”  That’s it.  That was the only criteria I had.  At the time, and given my track record, that seemed like a huge item.  In fact, that item seemed so big that no other items were necessary because in my eyes no one could love me exactly as I was.

So there I was gauntlet thrown down and answered with this beautifully packaged man uttering the phrase, “I have never met anyone like you before in my life.”  (I know you are all taking in your breath and probably rolling your eyes!)  The trouble was he meant it.  He was a genuine man who truly and wholly needed love as much as I did.  With all those flags waving around him he was stuck at the center alone, afraid, and hoping for rescue.  Guess what….the Coast Guard was here in the guise of a warm, neurotic, openly hurt, and truly hopeful woman!

 We began our “relationship” slowly and in the usual fashion.  He called, I answered.  He wrote, I wrote back.  We circled each other waiting to see who would make the next move.  He did, of course, and it was a precise and effective move.  He was honest.  He told me about his separation and his dilemma.  He explained his insecurities and how he felt ineffectual in his life.  He disarmed me with something I did not expect, sincerity.  Once disarmed I felt myself being drawn closer even though the smartest part of myself said, “Don’t do it!” 

 For it bit, it was fairy tale like.  We were lost in the haze of finding someone who understood who we were.  We were reveling in the intensity of passion, honesty, potential, and love.  Did we love each other?  Yes, we did.  We loved with truth but neither of us loved with openness.   He wasn’t free to do so and I was not going to love freely if it would not be reciprocated.  I may be a romantic, but I’m not stupid.  On this foundation, we built the dream and then tried to live the dream in a castle made of sand.  Everyone knows how that works out.  Sand castles are easily destroyed.  And our castle was no exception.  When it wasn’t being bombarded by the circumstances of our lives; of him being separated and feeling guilty for not reconciling to his other life and I reacting to his eminent abandonment, then it was being washed away by the water of hurt, deception, secrecy, and insecurity.  Why didn’t we wake up?  Why did we keep shoring up the walls and trying to keep the water from rushing in?  Easy, we wanted this.  We wanted the love, each other, the joy, the freedom, the escape, and the potential that we both saw if we could just be together.  At least that is what I believed.

 Truth was that I wanted that and he did not.  I wanted him to let go of his past and step into a future.  I wanted him to be strong enough to see that his life was a shambles.  I wanted him to choose me.  I wanted him to prove to me that I was worth taking a chance with.  I wanted him to validate that I was not a person you lived your life without.  So I kept filling up pails with sand and reapplying it to the quickly disappearing walls until the Universe said, “Enough”.

 The day the relationship ended was dramatic as any ending is.  There were tears, hurts, sobs, and regrets.  However, the ending was simply the beginning of the dream.  While I had believed that the relationship was the dream, it was simply the introduction.  The dream began when the relationship ended.  Then the castle became a 300 room, state-of-the-art, wired for Hi Def monument to what did not happen.  The castle grew to inhabit most of my psyche.  I spent countless hours discussing, regurgitating, and absorbing the how’s and why’s this relationship did not work.  I became a master craftsman and the rooms were adorned with vaulted ceilings and artwork that was created from the what if’s and should have’s.  And while I moved on in my life and the castle got smaller, I never let go! 

 Until today.  Today I let go.  More than that, today I saw my dream for the reality I had let it become.  While our unrequited love affair had been the instigator, I had taken up the torch to the dream I wanted it to be.  I fed it and watered it with the belief that we were supposed to be together.  I hovered over the coincidences that seemed to keep his name in the air, our situation being retold, and our songs playing everywhere I went.  I mired my feet in the possibilities of what we could have had and would not budge from that truth.  He, on the other hand, went back to what he knew.  He decided to play the game he already knew the rules for instead of stepping into a new and dynamic field to learn a new game.  He stayed safe.  He froze.  He caved.  He lost!

 It took a wise, wonderful, and potentially brave friend to make me wake up today.  I had let go of most of this dream.  I had grown and realized that living in a sand castle alone is uncomfortable and lonely.  But I didn’t realize that I had not entirely let go of the key that opened the dream.  The dream still had a place in me and therefore, so did he.  And while I had only been half-asleep, that is not how you want to live your life. 

 I had to admit to myself that even with all the work I had done to grow myself and to become the strong and powerful woman I am today, I still had some work left to do. I needed to let go of this dream entirely.  I needed to lift up the rug and sweep that shrinking sandcastle out of my heart.  Holding the broom in my hand, I thought that I would feel sad or even not be able to do it.  But as I brushed the first bit of wall away, I felt the truth shining into me.  As I finished with the dustpan and disposed of the last of our castle, I felt relief.  And as I walked across the rug in my heart without tripping, I felt empowered. 

 You see, for the longest time this castle and the wet sand it was made of was holding me back.  This dead and gone dream that I was allowing residence in my heart was keeping me from stepping into the world I am to inhabit.  And mostly, the pipe dream that I had been keeping alive was barring the real love and true partnership that I could experience from finding me. 

 I understand we need dreams and romance and all that those bring to our lives, but we need to know when to clean house.  We need to listen to those sent to help us see what our dirty windows cannot see.  And mostly we need to remember that life isn’t a dream but a series of twists, turns, dead-ends, and restarts that lead to a real castle.  I implore you to look at the castle you are living in and see if it is made from wet sand or from the flexible and solid wood of reality.  I feel today revitalized and ready to see the world without having to rub sand from my eyes.  What a wonderful way to live, alive in the world instead of half-asleep in the dream. 

 
Lorena Bathey
Author/Speaker
www.scepter-press.com
Lorena@scepter-press.com
Happy Beginnings: How I Became My Own Fairy Godmother

Author’s Bio

Writing has always been a part of Ms. Bathey’s life.  When the shock of divorce drove her to chronicle her emotions of change and metamorphosis into a book, the concept of being an author became a reality for her.  She believed her story could help other women as they could connect with the changes she was going through.  Finding the publishing world not as enchanted with her real-life, next-door tale of love, infidelity, and change she decided to start her own company Scepter Press to publish her book, Happy Beginnings: How I Became My Own Fairy Godmother.  Ms. Bathey is a speaker for women on empowerment, redefining their roles in life, and finding their inner Fairy Godmother to make their reality surpass their dreams.  When not writing her second book, a novel, she speaks to women and inspires them to grab their wand and start bringing in change.