I've grown up the majority of my life envisioning what it will be like to "grow up." I'd picture a bold woman with tons of friends. I'd picture someone successful and void of insecurity -- someone who does not fear the future, but is confident knowing that God will work everything out. I could spend hours at a time, dreaming of what it would be like to be this person. I'm afraid to say, it's not all it's cracked up to be. First, by doing this I've set an unreachable standard for myself (and growing up has made me realize that). Second, I haven't exactly obtained this identity, but as I look back on my life, I see I really have grown a lot. However, it wasn't as magical as I'd hoped. I don't think like the insecure girl who would sit around a dream of being someone other than herself, and because I don't think like her anymore, I failed to recognize when I stopped being her. Today, I am more secure in myself than I've ever been but I wasn't aware of that growth until it had already happened. Growth didn't look like I'd imagined so I couldn't see it until much later.

We always dream of "one day." We dream of the day we finally transform into this version of ourselves that we've so longed to be. We make conscious efforts in our growth to achieve the "us" we were made to be. It seems like when we are living in "one day" that our actual existence in that desired state of being prevents us from being aware of the fact that we have grown at all. As we grow, we mature and as we mature, our confidence increases and we just start to be okay with ourselves. One thing I've learned as I've grown is that I become less and less concerned with who I'm not. I stop picturing the journey it will take to reach my desired point of being, I stop envisioning how I want to be someday, and I just learn to operate successfully in who I already am. Most of the time, I do that without even realizing it.

Growth is a funny thing. In our heads, we like to imagine growth as being some dramatically revelatory process where we somehow can step outside of ourselves and watch the transformation take place, but I’ve never known growth to quite be like that. Rather than consciously feeling a change happening within myself, it is much more simple. You just kind of wake up one day and think, “Oh. I don’t really do that anymore.” It makes sense since you are the one growing that you wouldn’t see these alterations take place, because you are you after all. So you might not even know that you are growing, you just grow.