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When I was a kid, I thought I would grow up to be an actress. I thought I would live in New York City, in a high-rise apartment building, with my husband and family of, oh, five or six kids. I thought I'd live an urban, impossibly sophisticated1 life. Money would be no object. Perhaps there would be a private plane. (I should mention here that these fantasies were firmly rooted in the 1980's.) Well, I grew up and left the city for the country. I married and had one child -- an only child, just like I had been. My husband and I work hard to make ends meet. But my life - my rich, imperfect, complicated, contented2 life -- is the one I've built for myself. It's an honest life. It's a life of integrity3. It's a life I love. But to have it, I had to lose my fantasy straight out of the pages of a magazine of what it was that I thought I wanted - of who I thought I was. I was underselling myself, it turned out. To love, to really live is to become willing to lose people, places, things, dreams, even to lose versions of ourselves that no longer serve us. And in place of what is lost, something newemerges4. It may not be what we imagined. But it is beautiful and it is ours. | 
