Permission to Dream Again

I am very soon to leave on an adventure. At 33 years of age, I will pack my bags and board a plane towards Concord, North Carolina to attend the Proverbs 31 She Speaks writer’s conference with my wildest dreams of a book deal packed in neatly beside my handheld steamer and a fresh, colorful notebook. To many, a writer’s conference may sound like a total nightmare. Days of lectures and classes on how to become a better writer. A better author. A better storyteller. But not to me. To me, this sounds like the first step towards the rest of my life. And if you know me and know my situation, you may understand that this is also the first step in agreement that I have a “rest of my life” to live. A nod to the future I’ve been afraid to look in the eye as of late. Boarding that plane is turning from the threat of death and reopening my eyes and my heart to a dream I’ve had since I was a very little girl. 

To some, the conference may be an amazing time to network. The perfect way to meet the right person and move a career forward. From what I hear, there will be almost a thousand women in attendance and I know they will all have their own destiny to fulfill by being there. But for me, being there at all is the real victory. You see, when I was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer eighteen months ago, I silently gave up my desires and dreams of what I would be able to accomplish in my career and focused on praying for the necessity of healing. A singular focus to simply not die so I could be here for my husband and for my precious children. I cleared out all the wants to make room for this one big need. Let me stay with them. Please, God. Keep me here for them. 

In the very beginning, I just remember repeatedly saying, “I don’t want to die.” But part of me did. The daydreams of one day holding a book with my name on the byline or of me furiously signing my signature to a hardy piece of hardback as the line wrapped around the bookstore evaporated and disappeared. I vividly remember writing “author” on “When I Grow Up” worksheets back in grade school. I also remember lying to a particularly gullible date in college that I already had a book deal and was having to decide whether it was worth my time to even finish college with my burgeoning writer’s career waiting in the wings. (What can I say? Writers tend to be good liars. Occupational hazard.) That’s what a dream is. Something that is so a part of you it feels like truth before it even exists. A fire that was lit with a match you didn’t strike. This dream has been something I’ve willed to be true. Silently bartered and prayed for it to happen. Outside of my immediate family, this dream is my longest running relationship and like any relationship, we’ve had our ups and downs but never so low as when I turned my back on my imagination and buckled down to fight for my life. 

When you’re told your life might be cut much shorter than you anticipated, you focus on the minutes and the days; not the months and the years. It sharpens your appreciation for every single blessing. Big and small. It also trains your mind to not look too far down the calendar. Once you open that door, doubt and uncertainty pour in. So you learn to keep that door shut, locked, dead-bolted and then you push a dresser in front of it for good measure. You live locked inside the present. But that doesn’t mean the future won’t ring the doorbell. Always right outside. A faithful friend, wishing you’d come back out to play in the sunshine of good health and hopefulness. You send it away and refocus on the joy of the moment and try to quiet the instinct to plan for the future. Everything inside that room is blindingly beautiful and vividly colorful if you can learn to ignore why you locked the door in the first place. So we’ve lived every single day with cancer playing the part of some weird, distant cousin you’re forced to put up with every once in awhile but don’t really think about outside of holidays or family reunions. Sure, they’re out there lurking and probably commenting on your Facebook pictures from seven years ago like a creep, but you send them a Christmas card and keep it moving. Give it only the power it deserves.

A couple of months ago, after it was crystal clear that God was answering the desires of my heart and that I was doing incredibly well with treatment, that faithful friend came knocking on the locked up part of my heart that held my dreams of becoming a writer. Well, it wasn’t a knock so much as a “ding” when the email from She Speaks came through, but you get the metaphor. I had been asking God to let me share my story and the grace with which I am being carried through this entire journey, and when I opened that email, I knew. I knew with a conviction so strong and overwhelming it felt like I was already registered, bags packed and ready to go. I knew it was time to dream again. 

Getting on that plane will be very hard for me. It’s the first time I’ve flown since I’ve had kids and will be the longest I’ve ever been away from them. If you would’ve asked me a year ago if I’d take a solo flight away from my family to anywhere besides more treatment options, I would’ve snickered with the weight of knowing, You don’t go on vacation by yourself when you’re dying. So in a way, this is my declaration that I’m very much alive. So alive that I can move the chest of drawers away from the door to the future and peak towards what lies ahead. I’m agreeing with all the prayers and positivity spoken over me these last eighteen months that I will not die; instead, I will live to tell what the Lord has done. 

As I’ve prepared for this conference, little pieces of me have started to come back together as well as my eyelashes coming back in post-chemo. (Praise Jesus for small miracles.) It may sound silly, but while buying new clothes for the conference, I noticed I was being pulled back towards bright colors and prints after I had unknowingly been gravitating towards neutral colors or black since my diagnosis. Maybe a Freudian slip? Or maybe it’s not that deep? However, I do know that I’m excited about something for the first time in a long time above the bar of “I don’t want to die.” I’ve planned and put something together I’m incredibly proud of, but more than that, I’m just proud I took the step to claim my complete healing. I’m doing something for me. Something to wake up a dream in me that I thought I had no rights to after I heard the words “stage four”. I’m allowing myself to be just Haley again. Not Haley the cancer patient. Not sad for her and her situation, Haley. Just silly, storytelling Haley. I give myself permission to dream again.

So now I’m for real registered, bags packed and ready to go. I may not get a book deal. I may not get a second look. I may fail in the traditional sense of what most people show up at these events to accomplish. But hear my words, I will walk into that conference with the power of knowing that I’ve already won. I didn’t let fear cripple me into submission. I didn’t let some errant cells that decided to buddy up and build cancer kill, steal, and destroy a fire I believe God started in me years and years ago. It didn’t steal my joy, and I’m going to prove it’s not going to steal my dreams either. Sorry, cancer. I’m just not that into you.

So let me introduce myself. My name is Haley Isbell. Wife. Mother. Survivor. Dreamer. Writer.

Let’s do this.