A Story To Help You Follow Your Dreams

In today's blog post, I'm sharing a childrens book that I wrote for my niece as a Christmas gift in 2015, in hopes to inspire you to follow your dreams.

Originally, this hand-written and sketched book was collecting dust in my office for about five years.

Never to be seen, read or brought to life; I actually avoided eye contact with it most days, and it got me thinking about people and their dreams.

Beautiful dreams that (unfortunately) sit on the shelf, collecting dust, just waiting to be tossed.

These dreams usually come as an amazing idea at first, a wild, out of the blue thought, sometimes it's even a million dollar idea or a problem solving product, and for a split second, you truly believe you can do it!

Until.... pure silence. Nothing. Nada.

After a week, you've seemed to have completely forgotten what you were so excited and hopeful about in the first place, and ultimately, you just go back to living your every day life.

Your dream is now set aside in the back of your mind and you ignore it completely, because to even complete it, to even have that very thought, you'd first, need to believe in your ability to complete it.

Even before THAT thought can emerge, you'd need to believe in yourself and your ability to see it through. Hense why this book sat on the shelf for five years collecting dust.

I actually remember when I wrote this for my niece, I remember the day I thought of it as a Christmas gift.

She told me she was aspiring to be an Illustrator, so I wanted to show her that anything is possible by being the example, and viola, I decided to write and design a book to blow her mind. Boom! Greatest Aunt award, fireworks start playing, someone has a trumpet, I thought it was genuis.

I wrote the story in less than 15 minutes, started sketching the images and then off to the land of dust and nonpublished dreams it went, as I started to believe in it....less and less.

It was almost like the book I was writing for her was a reminder to myself that I had given up on SO MANY of my own dreams and slowly but surely, I just stopped sketching it.

Um. The same reason you're not an astronaut and you took down the planet/star collection on your ceiling.

It's like, you just find yourself pushing anything that resembles your dream further away with mindless tasks so you have an excuse to not do it or face it, but the reality is, you're just choosing not to do it, because then you'd have to face failure and the land of misfit "dreams" where all your great ideas went to do this:

So, I poured myself some wine, began to focus more on my "real job", and I chose to just avoid writing all together. For actual YEARS.

Christmas had gone by, birthdays, holidays, gatherings, eventually, people stopped asking me about it and I just genuinely forgot it was ever a dream or ever a thoughtful gift.

Until one day, as I was cleaning up my office, it fell off of the book shelf. BAM. "The Blue Bird King" it read, practically yelling at me, and I immediately realized, I needed to finish it.

Not just for my niece, not just to be a good role model, not even to formally publish it, but to just prove to myself (once again) that the only person that can ever achieve a goal or a dream, is me. How did I ever expect to be an author someday, if I couldn't even complete the Christmas sketch? That same day, I completed it and ordered my first hardcover copy.

The truth is, every single one of us has given up a dream or a passion project or something we were really excited about.

Maybe we never finish it because, we're scared of failing, maybe we're scared of it succeeding, maybe we're just genuinely busy, but, what we can't ever forget is that we can recreate, reinvent and reimagine our dreams at any time, as many times as we want to.

It's never too late to be who you might have been! It's never too late to dust off that bike and give it another spin, to give that paint brush another swirl around the canvas, to join that basketball league, to let someone read your poetry, even if it is just a short story you only wrote for your niece; you just have to ask the person in the mirror, what stops you from pursuing your dreams?

Here is the story of The Blue Bird King, a rhyming childrens interactive book and journal; may it be a light hearted reminder to always follow your dreams! Order it on Amazon here.