|怎么样面对梦想成为的人

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 Id live an urban, impossibly sophisticated^{1 life. Money would be no object. Perhaps there would be a private plane. 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 Ive built for myself. Its an honest life. Its a life of integrity3. Its 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 new emerges^{4. It may not be what we imagined. But it is beautiful and it is ours.}