Dream Awake

The spring before my thirtieth birthday I was heart broken. I had a fairy tale romance with a man from England. We met in Australia, instantly fell in love, and spent the next five years adventuring until we settled in Canada – ready to build an assumingly fabulous long life side by side. The bubbly bright girl with some mighty opinions who could always find a reason to smile was in pain. Well that was a good story, for heartache of some form is part of every fairytale, isn’t it? Our love story was epic while it lasted and in the end – my heart was grieving. A naive girl from Northern Ontario who believed all people, in the end, would choose love as I would, crumbled when someone chose their fear instead. The man I trusted would never hurt me, abandoned me. Perhaps we didn’t quite know enough about love to make it. I wonder what the stats would say if we could measure how often someone chooses fear over love? How often hearts break that never really...

I’m writing this because I don’t want to. Because I know I have to if I’m to grow into the woman my younger self dreamed she could be. I wonder as I write this if you’ll perhaps accept my unspoken invitation to be more vulnerable and real in your life. It just so happens that honesty and humility are mighty full of richness. Let me get past my fear already and continue.

My name is Jamie Sullivan, and today is an anniversary for me. Surely this anniversary is not one to be celebrated – or is it. I’ll leave that for you to decide.

These last four years, 2013-2016, have been so very full for me. Mountains worth of gratitude, despair & celebration. January 24, 2013, I woke from surgery in an unfamiliar hospital room to a surgeon telling me, groggy still from sedation and shock, that “there was no point in saving my fallopian tube because the pregnancy was too far along. And now that that’s handled there will be no more pregnancies for...