How did we end up here?

Finally seeing the forest, instead of just the trees.

Today I’ve been updating my bio and media on my website and I had a moment where I stopped and thought to myself wow, I have a website! And I need to update it.

Now, this may sound stupid to you. Obviously I have a website, otherwise I wouldn’t need to update the damn thing.

But what you have to understand is, I am not someone who celebrates the little things. I have dreams and goals and one of my favourite things in life is cracking them open and breaking them down into daily to-dos, (if I could make money from doing this for other people then I would be living one of my best lives) but I do not celebrate the daily wins. I don’t get to the end of the day and write my win list for tomorrow, or any sort of what have I achieved today list. I usually crawl into bed just happy that everyone ended the day with a roof over their heads, full tummies and the same number of fingers and toes that they started the day with.

So what I’m trying to say is (in a very round about fashion) that today I actually saw the progress I’ve made over the last few years.

It can be difficult when I see other narrators doing so well after such a short amount of time, to not look at my own journey and think, But why am I not there? and be really hard on myself. But the brutal truth is, I just haven’t done the work.

That isn’t to say I’m not doing the work. I just haven’t done it yet. We are all at different stages of our lives. I have children, a part time job, a dog… I have a husband too and while he does help with the list, he too has a full time job and wants and dreams of his own.

I have always been a fantastic procrastinator. You give me any task and I can give you ten reasons why I can’t do it right now and that’s just off the top of my head. If I had time, a pen and some paper, I’d be unstoppable (or un-get-going-able)! But I am getting better. I’ve learned to spot my procrastination for what it is.

That doesn’t make it any easier to start the hard tasks. But that’s where breaking it down comes in.

I guess a lot of the time, the problem is that I don’t believe in myself. I didn’t believe that I could become an audiobook narrator. It was a dream. An alternate universe Emma, but not this one in the here and now.

But today I added another tile of cover art from an audiobook that I narrated to my website and had to change the layout to make it more aesthetically pleasing because there were too many titles for the old layout. And isn’t that just wonderful.

Ever so slowly, I am getting there.

Quietly, I am becoming my future self.

And I am so proud.