It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything from within the depth of my brain but I realized recently that I’ve made great strides in my life and I want to tell you all about it.

My dad always said that graduating from college came as a great shock to him. Financially, he was suddenly making money and had credit cards and basically went crazy with it. Emotionally, he went from being at the top of the food chain to the very very bottom of the barrel. Luckily, I’m not finding the transition quite as drastic but man is it a shock! I thank goodness architecture steeled me for servitude, the hard work thing isn’t a problem. And my finances have just switched from spending the bank’s money to all the money I make now being given right back to them. My belt will remain cinched for the next 15 years. There’s no sudden freedom in that department.

The area I have had trouble with is figuring out where and how to channel all that passion I graduated with. School was hard. I’m talking drive you to tears almost daily, lock you in the same room with the same people on lots of red bull for days at a time hard. School was hard. But it also made me an incredibly strong, capable, ambitious woman. It forced me to define a reason for every one of my actions. It forced me to cut out the bull crap and focus on my immediate and future goals. My goals, upon graduating, were both for my career and personal life.

Personal: I wanted to travel and find a place I love to finally settle down and, eventually, have a family. I wanted to remain close with some incredible people I met in college while hopefully branching out and meeting new people. I wanted to get back to my family. My lovely, supportive, completely outrageous, and weird family, who I love and miss so dearly. I wanted to get back to them. And I wanted to stay with this amazing man that I met in my final year. Mike, my other half. I wanted our relationship to continue to grow and get stronger.

Career: I wanted to get some experience under a construction contractor, enough to have some confidence in my ability to know and direct the process. Then I wanted to start designing and building anything and everything. I wanted to have my own business as soon as I felt confident enough.

Wow was I shocked at how quickly a person’s ambition and dreams can be crushed under the weight of real life. While I am continuously working towards those goals, and am actually reaching some of them right this moment, I’m finding that so many of them were lost in the shuffle. So, in order to keep my goals at the forefront of my mind, and to keep myself from going insane in my current position in life, I remind myself why I’m doing what I’m doing.

What am I accomplishing for my life but also (and this is new for me) what am I bringing to other people’s lives. I am finding that, in helping other people define and reach their dreams in my place of work, I’m discovering and reaching my own. My dreams shift and meld with me. With each new experience, I try to improve as a person. As I become a better person, my dreams become better too!

A dream, a goal, and ambition does not have to be static. In fact, it’s better if it’s not. Dreams should flex as I grow as a person. They will become more detailed or more blurry. They will, sometimes, completely change direction. But the important thing about reaching my dreams, I realized, is that I find fulfillment in all the steps along the way. I will never get to the end point and think, was that really worth it?

So what are your dreams and goals? When was the last time you defined them? Maybe it’s time to write them down.