31. Livin’ the Dream 💭
Little girl: Anaana can we go to your rich friends house?
Mum: My rich friend? Which rich friend?
Little girl: The one with the dog and big house
Mum: Ohhhhh, you mean Chelsea???
Omgoodness we laughed so hard when she told me 😂 The one with the big house hey…
Yeah, what they don’t tell you about working hard to realize your goals, dreams, and aspirations is that sometimes, by the time you get there, you look around and wonder if it was all worth it.
What I don’t tell you when you come to my “big” house is that it took me 16 years, one set-aside aviation dream, a ton of failures, and a few hard-won federal submissions to get there. It doesn’t come out of thin air, and it certainly wasn’t without its costs.
Don’t get me wrong, it was the reality I actively built and that I wouldn’t stop until I got there, but there are some moments I look around, and I’m blown away, wondering how I got here 😅
Fast forward a few years, and I now have three dogs, and I like to believe they all came into my life when I needed them most.
My love of dogs started when I was born, as my late uncle Peter was a dog team owner. He used to take me to feed the dogs as early as three years old; I chose the one that was mine, and from that day on, the rest was history.
Growing up in social housing with my late great-grandmother, we didn’t have much, but she taught me to be rich in spirit. Something you can’t buy your way into.
Being traditionally adopted meant that I was fortunate to be raised by a stable, God-fearing woman who showed me love and kindness.
She spent most of her life teaching; I watched her teach young women how to sew and prepare materials. What’s funny is that she never forced me into being a certain way, and that’s one of the things I feel fortunate about.
She didn't live to see the house, or the dogs, or any of it. But everything she gave me, the richness that has nothing to do with money, is the actual foundation this was built on. The 16 years, the set-aside dream, the failures, the submissions, none of that would have held together without what she taught me first.
So when my friend's little girl calls this the "rich friend's house," she's not wrong; she's just looking at the wrong kind of rich. The real inheritance happened a long time before any of this existed.
So yeah, livin' the dream. Just not the version anyone sees from the porch. It's the 16 years, the dream I set aside, the woman who taught me what rich actually meant long before I ever had a dollar to prove it. The dogs who showed up exactly when I needed them. All of it, the parts you'd count and the parts nobody thinks to.
That's the dream. Not the house. Everything underneath it.
Who's counting anyway?
Aakuluk 💕
- C