The Dream on the Shelf

My friend looked at me the way you look at someone who has just announced they summited Everest barefoot in January when I told her I’d finished the first draft of my book.

“You actually finished something!”

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She meant it as a compliment. I took it as one. Mostly.

But there was also a tiny implication in there, and we both knew it. I am, to put it kindly, a dreamer. A visionary. A person with big ideas and, at times, very selective follow-through.

The official term, I think, is squirrel chasing.

Though if I’m being really honest, and that seems like the direction we’re going here, it’s probably something that starts with the F word…

Fear.

There. Now we can keep going.

The dream has been with me since I was a little girl. This hunger to write. To put words together in a way that made somebody feel seen, or less alone, or maybe just a little more understood.

Then I grew up, got married, had kids, and did the thing I was absolutely, joyfully, without question called to do: I became a wife and a mom.

If there are higher callings, I haven’t found them.

The dream didn’t die. It just got relocated. To a shelf. In the back of a metaphorical closet. Behind the holiday decorations and the bread maker I use twice a year.

It sat there for a long time.

Shelves are like that. Very patient.

Then I got cancer.

You would think this would be the dramatic part of the story where I march over, yank the dream off the shelf, blow off the dust, and begin writing my masterpiece.

That is not what happened.

What happened is that I sat in the oncologist’s office and told my daughter I was disappointed that I had never really pursued writing. My daughter, who came out practical and has only become more so with age, said, “Well, now would be the perfect time to start a blog.”

I went home, googled my diagnosis, googled treatment options, and then, because apparently that is who I am as a person, googled what is a blog.

I started my CaringBridge that day.

And somewhere in those dark and hard and uncertain months, I discovered that writing was not just something I had always wanted to do. It was something I needed to do. It kept me tethered. It gave me a way to process what was happening. It connected me to people. It filled something in me I hadn’t realized had been sitting empty for a long time.

I came out the other side of cancer with a zest for life and a dream that had apparently climbed off the shelf all by itself and was now standing in my kitchen drinking my coffee.

So I did what any brave and newly inspired cancer survivor would do.

I went to a writing conference.

Actually, two.

One of them was a Christian writers conference in Colorado. I was brave. I was hopeful. I was also, in hindsight, wildly underprepared for the soul-flattening efficiency of a publishing professional.

I shared a piece with an editor. He looked at it. He looked at me. And he said, “Your writing is too real and too raw. Christians won’t relate. The kind of stuff people want to read is more polished. Not so heavy.”

Now, I would love to tell you that I smiled graciously, thanked him for his time, and walked away with quiet confidence.

I did not do that.

What I did was put the dream back on the shelf so fast it nearly got whiplash.

That shelf.

That very patient, very faithful, slightly accusatory shelf.

And then life did what life does. I started a business. The years moved. And the last five, especially, brought five surgeries, a round of sepsis that landed me in the hospital for a week and sent me home with a month of antibiotics, and a whole new respect for the fact that a person can be stronger than she feels.

I spent a lot of those hard days staring at the shelf.

The dream stared back.

We had a whole silent relationship going. Very tense. Neither one of us blinked.

But I was tired. Too tired, really, to do much about it.

Then, about a month ago, I came across a woman on YouTube. She is 44 years old. She has five children. She has stage 4 colon cancer.

And out of nowhere, I had this thought, and I really do believe it was the Holy Spirit putting His hand on my shoulder and saying, Pay attention.

My heart breaks for her. I wish my book were written so I could send it to her.

And then immediately:

My book.

That book.

The one I had not written. The one I had been meaning to write. The one I had apparently kept on a shelf behind the bread maker for years, like some sort of emotional seasonal décor.

The next day, I started writing.

And I do not mean “started writing” in the cute, respectable way where you open a document, type a thoughtful paragraph, and then light a candle and call yourself a writer.

I mean, it started like somebody turned on a faucet and forgot to mention where the shut-off valve was.

I wrote in the car while my husband ran into Menards. I wrote in the Costco parking lot. I wrote when we got home. I wrote as if the words had been stored under pressure for twenty years and someone had finally cracked the seal.

And before I quite knew what had happened, I had a rough first draft.

The book is about the emotions of cancer. The ones nobody really warns you about.

My medical care was excellent. My support was real. But what I wished for, in the thick of treatment, was that somebody had sat down beside me and said, Here is what may happen to you emotionally. Here is what fear may sound like. Here is what grief may feel like. Here is what might surprise you. And here is the truth that will hold when everything else feels like it is moving.

I wrote it for the woman who just got the diagnosis and is meeting fear in a way she never has before. I wrote it for the woman who is weary in the middle of treatment. I wrote it for the woman on the other side, looking at the wreckage and the rebuilding and wondering, now what?

This past Monday, I finally took the dream all the way off the shelf.

I sent four sample chapters to three women.

With trembling fingers. Shallow breathing. The whole dramatic production.

I did not sleep Monday night. At 2 a.m., I was wide awake, second-guessing every word.

I opened my email at least seventeen times to draft some sort of apology note that basically said, "Please disregard my vulnerability and delete that entire message.”

I did not send it.

You’re welcome, ladies.

Instead, I prayed. I journaled. I sat with God. And I got honest about what was actually underneath all the panic.

And what I realized was this:

I was not really afraid they would hate the writing.

I was afraid that this dream, the one I had protected for so long by keeping it small and theoretical and safely out of reach, might not survive real air.

What if I let it breathe and it died anyway?

What if I was the one who killed it?

What if I fail?

That was the real question.

And now here we are. Four days later. Nobody has called an ambulance. Nobody replied with a series of question marks. The world has not ended.

The dream is still breathing.

And I am beginning to think that all those years it sat on that shelf, it was not waiting for me to rescue it.

It was waiting for me to be ready.

Here is what I know now, as a lifelong dreamer, a certified squirrel chaser, and a woman who once googled what is a blog after a cancer diagnosis:

It is hard to have a dream and move toward it.

It costs you something. It rattles your nervous system. It steals your sleep. It makes you want to unsend emails in the middle of the night and pretend none of this ever happened.

But it is also hard to have a dream and do nothing with it.

And I think that kind of hard lasts longer.

The shelf will always be there.

The question is whether the dream will.

So take it down.

Even if your hands are shaking.

He's been holding it all along anyway