For years, I thought being a good person meant giving everything I had away.

I poured myself into my kiddo, my marriage, my friendships, my responsibilities, and the countless invisible tasks that keep a household and a life running smoothly. I became someone people could count on, and I took pride in that.

And in many ways, it worked. Birthday parties were planned. Appointments were set and never forgotten. Food was always prepped. The people I loved felt loved. From the outside, my life looked full—and it was. I am deeply grateful for the life I’ve built and the people who share it with me.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped asking myself a simple question:

What do I want?

Not what needs to get done next. Not what everyone else needs from me. Not what would make me more productive or more efficient.

What do I want to create? What do I want to experience?

What dreams have I quietly set aside because there was always something more urgent demanding my attention?

The truth is, I didn’t lose myself all at once. There wasn’t a dramatic moment when I woke up and realized I had vanished. It happened gradually, through a thousand small decisions to put myself last.

I assumed there would be time later. Later, when life settled down. Later, when Scarlett was older. Later, when work wasn’t so demanding.

Later, when everyone needed me a little less.

The problem is that life doesn’t really work that way. There is always another season, another responsibility, another reason to postpone yourself. If you’re not careful, your own dreams can become permanent residents of the “someday” list.

Looking back, I don’t think I stopped prioritizing myself because I lacked ambition. If anything, I was ambitious on behalf of everyone around me. I wanted to support the people I loved. I wanted to show up well. I wanted to be dependable, thoughtful, reliable, and strong.

What I didn’t realize was that I had become so focused on helping everyone else build a meaningful life that I had stopped building one for myself.

Then life threw me a curveball. Most of us get one eventually—a moment that cracks open the story we’ve been telling ourselves about who we are and how life is supposed to go. The kind of moment that forces us to take an honest look at what we’ve been avoiding.

What surprised me wasn’t the challenge itself. It was what it revealed.

Beneath all the responsibilities, routines, and roles I had accumulated over the years, there was still a woman waiting for me. A woman with dreams she hadn’t pursued. A woman with stories she wanted to tell. A woman who had spent so much time tending to everyone else’s needs that she had forgotten to tend to her own.

For years, I had been asking what everyone else needed from me. The curveball forced me to ask a different question: what do I need from myself?

The answer didn’t arrive all at once.

It arrived in fragments. In quiet moments. In notes scribbled down before bed. In poems written between responsibilities. In stolen pockets of time that I slowly stopped thinking of as stolen.

What began as a few scattered poems became a conversation with myself. Then a practice. Then the art of making time for myself. Then, eventually, a way home.

Each poem helped me reconnect with something I had misplaced along the way: my curiosity, my creativity, my grief, my wonder, my joy. With every page, I felt myself becoming less of a spectator in my own life and more of a participant.

And somewhere in that process, I discovered something else: I had always thought resilience meant carrying more. Holding everything together. Being the strong one. Enduring.

But resilience can also look like returning to yourself. It can look like telling the truth that you’ve lost your way a bit. It can look like making room for your own dreams. It can look like believing that your needs matter, too.

For a long time, I believed that choosing myself meant taking something away from the people I loved. As if every hour spent writing was an hour stolen from someone else.

What I discovered was the opposite. The more disconnected I became from myself, the less of me there was to give.

I could show up. I could manage the logistics. I could keep everything moving. But there is a difference between being present and being alive.

When I started making time for my own dreams, I didn’t become less available to the people I loved. I became more myself with them. More engaged. More inspired. More joyful. More whole.

My fulfillment was never in competition with the people I love. It nourished the very parts of me that love them.

Eventually, all those stolen moments and scribbled poems became a manuscript. Then, years later, a book.

But finishing the book wasn’t important because I published something. It was important because I kept a promise to myself. A promise that my dreams mattered too. A promise that creativity wasn’t selfish. A promise that my voice deserved a place at the table of my own life.

Every poem was written in moments I could have given away. An hour here. A morning there. Energy that could have gone somewhere else.

Instead, I invested it in myself.

And over time, those small acts became something larger. Not just a book—a relationship with myself.

I think many of us are carrying dreams we’ve convinced ourselves can wait. A class we want to take. A business we want to start. A trip we want to take. A story we want to write. A version of ourselves we’re still hoping to meet.

Maybe the question isn’t whether we’re capable of those things. Maybe the question is whether we’ve decided they deserve our time.

I spent years making sure everyone I loved had room to grow. Writing taught me that I deserved room to grow, too. And that has changed far more than anything I could ever put on a bookshelf.

Seeing my daughter light up when I got my first copy of the book and told her mommy made it was one of the highlights of my life. And hearing her tell other people about it, with so much pride, was even better.

In the end, the book wasn’t what changed my life. Making room for myself did.

~

Loved this? Check out one of Kate’s classic Elephant articles: