I Almost Didn't Do The Thing
how noble distractions keep us from our greatness and why self-abandonment isn't nearly as cool in real life as it is the movies.
I woke up this morning with a flutter in my chest and visions of all the things I still want to do. And underneath the flutter, like always, the secret most of us will never say out loud, even to ourselves: sometimes we fall in love with the very things that hold us back. And we love them because they hold us back. Some quiet part of us is grateful. Grateful that we didn't have to step into our own greatness. Grateful that something showed up to give us a reason not to.
These noble distractions are the ones that come dressed in love and family and duty and care. They earn us no judgment, only sympathy. They aren’t the ones we feel ashamed of. Not the scrolling, the drinking, the doom-everything. They’re the other ones. She had to stay. Her mother got sick. Her partner needed her. The kids were small. She fell in love. The reasons the unlived life look like a sacred one.
We rehearse this story in our movies. The woman who is one airport away from her dream. Paris, the fellowship, the move, the next chapter. And then someone shows up just in time with a confession. She stays. We swoon. The credits roll on the exact moment she traded the rest of her becoming for somebody else’s certainty.
In one of my favorite shows, Good Witch - Abigail tells Donovan she wants to live in Tuscany. She has been carrying it like a small bright stone in her pocket for years. He wants to stay. His career and political life is here. So Tuscany goes back into her pocket. The show frames it as love. I cringed.
In the show’s hands, Tuscany is just a setting. But for Abigail it is a symbol. For the version of her life that is hers alone. Slow mornings. Her own language for things. A woman with no one else’s last name pressed onto her life dream. We all have a Tuscany. Everyone reading this knows what theirs is. The thing you talk about someday. The thing you brought up once, watched the room go quiet, and never brought up again.
The noble distraction is not always a villain. Sometimes it is a beautiful person with kind eyes who never asked you to abandon yourself. They just stood there, being lovable, while you did it.
Greatness requires something. That is the thing we don’t say. It requires sacrifice and risk and the kind of work that makes you cry into a pillow at midnight. It requires that you stop practicing the version of yourself everyone has gotten comfortable with. It requires that you find out whether you are actually the person you secretly hope you are. Or whether you have been a story the whole time.
Most of us are not willing to find out.
So when the universe sends a noble reason to stay (a sweet face, an aging parent, a community that needs us, a someone who finally chose us back), some part of us exhales. Thank god. Thank god I get to keep the dream pristine. Thank god I get to be someone who would have without ever testing whether I would.
This is the propaganda we have written about ourselves. We have called it loyalty. We have called it priorities. We have called it love. Sometimes it is. And sometimes it is the most respectable cage we could find. The one with the prettiest bars. The one no one will ever question us for staying inside.
Here is what I know about myself.
I have all the reasons. The aging parent. The someone who finally chose me. The community that depends on me showing up. The whole respectable bouquet.
And what’s keeping me up at night lately isn’t my love. It isn’t even my worry. It is the feeling that the dream is calling. The phone is ringing. The window is open. I am so practiced at self-abandonment (in the hopes of love, in the name of not abandoning others) that I am almost willing to abandon my dream as a declaration of loyalty. As a love letter. As proof.
But here is what I know about my dad: he wants me to live my dream. And the man I love? Well, the woman he loves is feral. Asking me to stay small to keep him would be asking him to love a stranger.
There may come a time when real necessity asks me to stay for a while. This is not that time. And even when it comes, staying for a season is not the same as folding the dream into a smaller shape forever.
Because here is the other thing I’ve learned about myself: I have done this before.
I walked the Camino alone. And it was scary as hell. I left a marriage that, by all accounts, made me look crazy for leaving. I used to say it out loud, like a vow: I will never be the woman who stays just because.
I am the woman who eats the fruit. And I love her.
As I shared my “travel the world plans.” the man I love asked me a question. Is your dream more important than me?
I said yes. Absolutely. Without flinching.
Not because I don’t love him. Because love is a yes, and game, not an either-or one. Because choosing the dream is not choosing against him. It is choosing for me. And, if I am right about him, choosing for the relationship we could actually become on the other side of my full size.
Because when I imagine the version of me at the end of her life, sitting somewhere quiet, looking back, she is not weeping over the loves she didn’t stay for. She is weeping over the dream she didn’t live. The book unwritten. The song unfinished. The Tuscany unvisited. The version of herself she met once, in a flash, and accidentally declined to become.
That woman, the one at the end, has a question for me. She asks it persistently, because she is me, and she still loves me.
Why have a dream, she says, if you weren’t going to live it?
It is the same idea, really, as: why have the fruit if you weren’t going to eat it? We were taught the fruit was a trick. We were taught that wanting was the first sin, that the woman who reached for it ruined everything. As if the fruit were not, in fact, for eating. As if dreams were not, in fact, for living. As if wanting the whole of your one life were a kind of greed.
This is the propaganda we inherited. And we are still buying into it.
Eve, somewhere, is chuckling. She did the thing. She took the bite. She has been waiting a few thousand years for the rest of us to stop apologizing for our own appetites. To stop pretending the fruit was a mistake. She is, quite frankly, our girl.
I want to convey this with all my heart — it never has to be one or the other. You can love someone and live your dream. You can have the partner and the Tuscany, or in my case London. Most of the time, the either-or is a false fork. A story we inherited from people who were not themselves free.
SO.
If you ever find yourself at the actual fork, if you ever feel the pull to fold the dream into a smaller shape so the love can fit, notice the way you talk about it.
There is a difference between I loved them, so I didn’t do the thing and I love myself enough to do the thing.
One is a story about them.
The other is a confession about you.
The unmet dream, in the end, is not really about the dream. It is about self-love. It is about whether you believed your own life was worth showing up for. It is about whether you thought you were the kind of person who got to be the one who did the thing.
So if you are ever in a position where it really does feel like you have to choose (and may you not be; may the path stay wide and the choice stay false), please, please choose to love yourself the absolute mostest.
Not because the people who love you don’t matter. They do. They will be okay. Most of them will love you more for it, eventually, when they see what you become on the other side of the going.
But because the version of you waiting at the end of your life is also someone who deserves to be loved. And she is asking.
Cheers to your love and your fruit,
Vanessa
What’s your Tuscany? Or your Camino? Or the thing you almost didn’t do, but did anyway? Tell me in the comments. I want to hear it. 🍏