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Introduction: Dare to Dream

My name is Brandy M. Miller, and I am a dreamer. I have held four dreams close to my heart since the age of 4: I wanted to be rich enough that I could afford to buy my very own Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine because I was already tired of hearing my mom tell me we didn’t have enough money every time I asked for something. 

I wanted to become a great saint because I wanted everyone to love me and to admire me and I could tell that people loved and admired the great saints. I wanted to own my own business because I needed to earn my own money and my mom had already told me that she wasn't going to let me become a model or a child actress - the two careers available to a four year old. 

Last, I wanted a normal family. That last may not seem like much of a dream to you, but when you come from a long line of crazy like I did, you can appreciate just how far of a stretch that dream actually was.

If not for my dreams, I don’t know where I would be, but I’m pretty sure it would not be a good place. My dreams have kept me going when there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of reasons to keep going. They have given me something to reach for, to strive toward, and to see as possible better days ahead even when there was no other evidence to support that hope.

That's why I've chosen to write this book. I want to inspire people to dream boldly. Many people I encounter are so beaten down by life that they fear to dream. They fear getting their hopes up only to have them cruelly dashed by life. They fear getting hurt. They fear trying only to experience the pain of failure. They allow their fears to keep them locked in a prison of their own making, bound to a life they don't want, and chained to their misery.

I know what that is like. For years, I set my dreams aside as being too unrealistic and impossible for me to achieve. I'd tried to run a business of my own and failed at that so often, I gave up hope it could be possible for me. My dreams would not die. They demanded that I get back up and try again. They insisted that I go after them. My heart simply would not listen to reason.

Dream Boldly

Dreaming takes courage. It takes courage to face up to all the people who tell you that you can't achieve your dreams. It takes courage to face up to all the people who look at you and your life and doubt that you have what it takes to achieve them. It takes courage to risk the pain of failure time and time again until you master the skills that are necessary to fly. It takes courage to step out from beyond the boundaries of your safe and familiar prison to the unknown and unpredictable world in which dreams are born.

I encourage you not only to dare to dream, but to dream boldly. The bigger your dream, the greater the obstacles you will face in achieving it and the more that you will find people mocking you for trying. Do not let that stop you. Dream as big as you can stretch your mind to dream. It has been my experience that the more audacious and incredible the dream compared to where I am in life, the faster my progress in achieving smaller dreams than when I dream small dreams and try to work toward those because I think those are achievable and my real dreams are not.

As a small example of this truth, twenty years ago, I fell in love with the city of Denver while visiting a friend. I set an intention of moving to Denver. It was a small dream, but no matter how many ways I tried to make it happen, nothing ever opened up.

It wasn’t until I set a great big dream of buying one of the most expensive houses on the market so that I could have a place to host regular writers retreats that things changed. That big dream demanded that I find a way forward to reach it, and when I began to write a story about how I put together the money to purchase that dream house, that was when I stumbled across the vision that would eventually lead me to Denver.

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Mess

Dreams, like all creative efforts, are messy things. They never behave in the way that you expect them to behave. They shift and change without warning, abandoning one thread only to pick up a seemingly completely unrelated thread in the next moment. Even the people and animals in them shift and change, seemingly at random, becoming completely new.

Dreams are not given to you by mistake. They are a mess, but every mess contains a message that flows from the fountain of Life, Love, and Light. The messages of dreams are meant to draw you toward a life that is full of love, light, and unlimited possibilities.

Even nightmares are not sent to harm you, but to confront you with important truths you have been denying so that you can see them for what they are and finally begin making progress toward living a life that is truly worthwhile. They are meant to persuade you into abandoning the things in your life that aren't fulfilling your needs so that you can find those things that will. As it is in dreams, so it is in life.

Your life contains many messes. You may feel guilt, shame, pain, anger, envy or grief every time you think of those messes. These negative feelings may have led you to shoving the memories into a closet in your mind and locking them away where you hide them from sight. These moments are incidents you have sworn never to speak of to anyone. You may be afraid to let people close in case they would find out about these messes and no longer love you or care to be your friend.

It is these messes, though, that contain the most powerful messages we have to offer others. They are the source of our hidden superpowers, the very thing that will enable us to achieve our dreams, but only when we are ready to open up that mental closet door and face up to them. Inside those unexamined messes we will find messages of hope, healing, triumph, victory, perseverance, love, and of beauty in dark places and spaces.

Those messages are not meant for us to keep, but to share with others. It is in sharing those messages that we will begin to serve, and in our service we will begin to plant the seeds of our own future success, and when those seeds are ready for harvest, we will find our dreams have come abundantly true.  

Writing the life of your dreams will be a messy process. There will be unexpected twists and turns in the journey. You will have to let go of your expectations about how things will turn out and embrace the unexpected. You will make plans, only to have those plans radically change when confronted with new realities. If you wish to succeed in writing the life of your dreams, you must accept from the very beginning that nothing will go according to your plan. The final outcome of your journey will be so much greater than your expectations that what you expected will pale in comparison.

Entering the Construction Zone

When you begin working toward writing the life of your dreams, be prepared for your life to turn completely upside down. You will lose both things and people you thought you couldn’t live without. You will find yourself forced to stand alone for a time. People you love dearly will betray or abandon you or become an outright obstacle to you. This is a natural, normal, and necessary part of fulfilling your dreams.

I have lost nearly everything I owned eight times in the last 21 years as I worked to build my dreams. Each time, I faced fears of letting go of what I had only to find that, when I got to a new place in my life, what I got was better than anything before that. Eventually, I stopped being afraid of losing things and learned that the faster I let go of what was, the sooner what was better would come into my life.

The destruction process is painful. There’s no way around it. You will be forced to let go of many things and people that you valued and that you relied upon to get you through. It will feel as if you are losing everything. Your beliefs will come under attack and you will find yourself re-evaluating everything you ever thought you knew.

While you are in this phase of construction, you may doubt that your dreams will ever come true. It will be tough to keep going as your worst fears will appear to be coming to life. However, if you’re seeing the destruction know that the construction won’t be long on its heels, and once the dust settles on your new and beautiful life, it will be well worth it.

The life you have now is a shanty compared to the palace that awaits you at the end of your dream building. Before the dreams you have in mind can become your new reality, that shanty must be completely torn down and removed. Much of what was propping up that shanty was built on lies you’d been told by adults you trusted and by messages you received from media and other authority figures. Building your new life on top of that old shanty would render the new building unstable and the work you’re doing to improve yourself useless.

This portion of the dream building process will take a while to complete. You may be in a hurry to get the process completed so that you can live in the palace now – but neither you nor it are ready. Rushing the process won’t result in a better experience. You have entered a construction zone, and the first phase of any construction process is the destruction of what was already there.

You must be completely transformed in order to become the kind of person you must be in order to live the life of your dreams without that life crushing or destroying you. The caterpillar can’t fly until the wings are grown, and the wings can’t grow until the caterpillar itself is dissolved inside the cocoon so that the new creation – the butterfly – can be formed in its place. Once that butterfly is ready, there is a struggle to emerge from that cocoon. The struggle is painful and exhausting, but important for building the strength and resilience the butterfly will need to fly in the face of the winds that will carry it to and from the flowers that will feed it.

Dream Building Is a Life Long Process

The dreams I hold for my life today are not what they were 21 years ago. Back then, I was still trying to figure out who I was. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I hadn’t found my purpose, I wasn’t even sure I had one. I knew I wanted to be rich, but I had no idea what that meant except to have more money in the bank than I knew how to spend.

My dreams have changed significantly since then, both in size and scope and intention. I have changed just as significantly. Today, I know that I do not need to focus on being rich. I already am rich. I possess an abundance of a kind of wealth that cannot be stolen from me, devalued, lost, destroyed, or taken from me. When I give my kind of wealth away, the wealth I possess multiplies. When I share it, I gain more of it.

Today, my dream is to create a writer’s retreat center where I can teach others how to find their interior, true wealth and bless the world with it by writing the life of their dreams. I have already found the perfect location for the center. It is now just a matter of connecting with those who need what I have so that I can trade what I have for what I desire.

Building the life of your dreams is not something you do once and then you’re done. It is a process. Your capacity to dream will grow as you do. The dreams that fit you today may be too small and confining for you tomorrow. You will have to stretch yourself to grow into your new dreams, and that process will take you through the same cycle of destruction-construction-completion.

Your story is still being written. The last chapter won’t be completed until after your death. Expect the story to have many twists and unexpected turns. That’s what makes life worth living – the unexpected. There will be times when you will experience fear, but don’t let it stop you or hold you back. That’s not what it was meant to do. It was simply placed in your life to warn you of the dangers so you can address them and make a plan for dealing with them. Keep dreaming. And dream boldly.

Join Our Writing Dreams Team

If you’re reading this, consider this your open invitation to join our Writing Dreams Team (https://www.facebook.com/groups/writingdreamsteam/). It’s a FREE Facebook group where I provide help and support to those who are interested in learning how to write the life of their dreams, just like you.

Joining the Facebook group does not cost you anything. You will not be pestered or annoyed or spammed with offers to buy this thing or do that thing. I am not there to harass you, but I will encourage you to post to the group. Reach out, make friends, share your victories and your visions with the other dream teamers. The more involved you choose to become, the more you will get out of your membership in the group.

Don’t be shy. This is one group where you will find that everyone in that group is engaged in pursuing dreams just like you are they are going to understand what you’re going through in a way that few people outside of that circle do. Their dreams may be different than yours, and the obstacles they face in achieving them may be different, too, but the struggle is all the same.

The only competition is with yourself. You’re on a race to become the best you that you can possibly be before you die. That’s it. If someone else is further ahead in that race, ask them how they got there and learn from them. Remember: If they can do it, you can do it, too.

If someone else isn’t quite where you are in life, that doesn’t make you better than them. That just means you have help you can offer them when they’re ready to receive it. Don’t rush them, though. Advice given to someone when they aren’t ready to receive it is a lot like someone putting cream in another person’s coffee without asking for permission first: It’s a recipe for hurt feelings and wasted effort all around.

You are reading this book so I am going to assume that you are ready for advice. That’s why I’m offering it. If you don’t like the advice I give, feel free to ignore it or take what you feel is useful and leave out the rest. I promise I won’t be offended if you decide the advice I give is just not for you. Not everybody likes cream in their coffee, and that is okay.

Today’s Homework

Oh, you thought you were just going to get to read this book and do not work, did you? I didn’t get my Associates in Elementary Education for nothing! I don’t want you to just read this book. I want you to put it to good use. That’s why I’m going to give you homework.

Grab a pen and a paper and set a timer for 10 minutes. All I want you to do right now is write about your dreams. Feel free to let your mind wander wherever it wants to go as you are writing. What dreams have you set aside that you would like to explore now? What dreams have you dismissed as unreasonable or impossible to achieve? Let those dreams come back up to the surface and write them down. Don’t censor or judge your dreams. Just let them be.

When you are done with your writing exercise, post it to the group. Don’t label the dreams, don’t dismiss them, don’t judge them. Simply accept them for what they are. Dare to dream.

Chapter 1. Life in the Cereal Bowl

I fondly refer to the family I grew up in as a cereal bowl family – full to the brim with fruits, nuts, and flakes. My father was a third-generation paranoid schizophrenic. I suspect this was the result of three generations of first cousins deciding to pick up dates at the family reunion.

My life story begins in the psychiatric ward because that is where my parents first met. He was a patient. My mom was the ward secretary. She knew his diagnosis, but apparently missed the class where they teach you that the clinic isn’t the best place to pick up dates. I like to tell people that both of my parents were crazy, but only one of them had paperwork to prove it.

My parents marriage would last just long enough to produce me and my little brother before it ended. Less than two months after the divorce and just before my fourth birthday, my mom met her new boyfriend at the astronomy lab in college. He was a teacher’s assistant and introduced himself by insulting her. Apparently, she thought that was a great sign of things to come.

A lot of things changed for me at the age of four. That was the year I decided that I wanted to be a great saint because I didn’t want anybody else to leave me. Losing my father was bad enough.

It was the age I decided I wanted to be rich, because rich people didn’t have to hear “we don’t have enough” of anything. It was the year I decided I would one day own my own business because that was the only work that somebody who was four years old and whose mother absolutely refused to allow her to audition for television or modelling work was going to be able to make her own money.  It was also the year I began dreaming of having a normal family, one with a father who didn’t leave me or who didn’t hurt me.

It was also at age 4 that I learned to read. Reading became my safeguard and my lifeline to sanity. It showed me that starting your own business was possible, and gave me ideas for how I could do it. It showed me healthy, normal families and gave me hope that one day I could have one of my own. Television filled in the gaps for me on what it would be like to be rich. I remember watching cartoons about Richie Rich and other shows like Different Strokes where rich people featured prominently. I had no idea how to get where they were, but I was determined someday I would.

We didn’t have a Bible in our home or a book about saints, so I wasn’t really able to study that or imagine what it would take for me to get there. I just knew the scriptures I heard at Mass each week – and the words, “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” became my mantra. I wanted to be perfect so I could please God and become a saint.

I made two attempts to start my own business at age 4. The first was a business picking weeds for our neighbors at 10 cents a weed. It didn’t take me long to figure out that this business had a very low profit margin unless I could find and recruit help and then I’d have to split the profits.

My next business idea was to take the blackberries I picked, smoosh them up, and turn them into powdered drink mix by letting the liquid evaporate in the sun. I planned to sell the drink mix for just 10 cents a packet. Needless to say, this next business idea was even less successful than the first.

When Mom’s new boyfriend moved in that February, my father returned back to his home state of Mississippi where all of his family lived. I wouldn’t see him again for twenty years, although I would hear from him periodically. He told me later he thought he was doing the best thing for me by leaving me in my mother’s hands, proving just how crazy he really was.

What my father hadn’t recognized is that life with my mother was like living with a permanently hormonal teenager. You never knew what to expect from her. She could be happy and fun one minute and then turn on a dime and in the next breath be screaming and ranting at me about what a terrible brat I was, how ungrateful I was, and how I never did anything she wanted me to do.

My mother was also a worry-wort with horror stories about every situation you could imagine. Hire a babysitter? She has a story for you. Want to go on a walk in the woods? She had a horror story for you. She was afraid of absolutely everything and spent most of her time worrying. I rebelled against her fear mongering by pushing myself to do things that scared me, and would have definitely scared her had she known they were being done.

Her idea of a “fun” game to play with me and my older sister was the hitting game. This was literally a game where we would take turns hitting each other harder and harder until someone cried. The fact that she was an adult and had the natural advantage over me in this did not seem to make a difference to her. If I cried, it was my fault for being unable to handle it.

My mother’s boyfriend was a bully who absolutely delighted in terrorizing me and my brother with his leather belt, a leather belt he was very fond of applying to us when he didn’t like our behavior. Like my mother, he had a volatile and unpredictable temper that could go off at any moment. If you cried, he would simply hit you more. Between my stepfather and my mother, I learned very early not to cry.

From them both, I also learned not to feed the bullies. Bullies thrive on fear, so I learned not to show how afraid I might be no matter how terrified I might be on the inside.

Both my stepfather and my mother used me in their own ways. My stepfather used me sexually to fill the void where a healthy spousal relationship belonged. My mother used me emotionally to fill the void where healthy adult friendships belonged. I was expected to meet their needs, but my own needs were neglected and dismissed.

I was punished for showing anger, sadness, pain, hurt, or unhappiness of any kind. I was told it was my fault I was feeling those things and I needed to fix it. However, I was held responsible for the pain, anger, sadness, hurt, or unhappiness of the adults in my life. Their feelings were my fault, and I was supposed to fix it by doing what would make them happy. I grew up feeling like nothing I did was ever good enough to satisfy anyone, desperate to please the people around me, and frustrated by my apparent constant failure to achieve my objective.

By age 6, I was such a perfectionist that I burst into tears when I got an 89 on my math paper. My teacher was puzzled by my reaction and asked what was wrong.

“I’m just so devastated. My parents are going to kill me!”

My teacher couldn’t help but be impressed that I used devastated correctly in a sentence at age 6, but none of that mattered to me. The thing that mattered to me was that I knew my mother wasn’t going to accept a B from me. She was the kind of parent that only accepted A’s, and if you brought home a 90, she wanted to know why it wasn’t a 95. If you brought home a 95, she wanted to know why it wasn’t a 100.

I didn’t see my mother’s behavior as abusive, but I did see my stepfather’s behavior that way. I knew what he was doing was wrong. He was beating up my mother, my brother, my sister, and me. Their fights scared me. I begged my mother to leave him.

Every night, I would pray to God for two things: that God would stop my stepfather from hurting us anymore and that God would send me a little brother or a little sister to love. Apparently, my little brother was not good enough for me.

At age 7, my mother picked me up from school. That was unusual. We were latchkey kids who took care of ourselves from the time school let out until our parents got home a couple of hours later.

When she pulled into the driveway, she asked me if anyone had ever touched me in a way that made me feel weird. That’s when I told her about my stepfather teaching me to perform oral sex on him. He’d started molesting me at age 4 with “tickling” over the underwear to the point where I trained myself not to be ticklish so he wouldn’t do it anymore. I guess I thought that would stop things, but it didn’t.

She thanked me for telling her and let me get out of the car. She never said another word about it.

Three weeks later, he came home from his assignment and cornered me in the living room. I was terrified that he was going to whip off that leather belt and beat me with it for having told Mom, but he didn’t. Instead, he told me that if I ever talked again, he would go to jail and me and the rest of my family would be out on the streets because he wouldn’t be there to support us.

I knew that was true. Mom was still in school and she didn’t really have the money to support us on her own.

But I also recognized something else. He was afraid of me. More to the point, he was afraid I was going to talk. He was afraid of my story. And that meant I couldn’t stop talking. I had to keep going, to keep telling it until I found someone who would listen, because that was the only thing that was going to stop him from continuing to hurt us.

It would take me 2 ½ more years, but this time my mother did listen and she did take action. He was sent to jail. That wasn’t the end of the problems for our family, though. I grew up with my mother blaming my stepfather for every problem in their relationship. All of the financial problems were his fault. All of the relationship problems were his fault. All of the problems were his fault. Now he wasn’t there to blame.

She fell into a deep depression and emotionally withdrew into her own world, reading book after book after book on the topic to try and understand how she’d gotten to this point in her life. My siblings blamed me for where we were in life. It was my fault for talking, my fault for doing something about the abuse we’d all hated. Into the middle of all of this, my mother found out she was pregnant. Both of my prayers had been answered, but my dream of having a normal family was a long way from being realized.

Single parenthood can be tough on a sane, relatively healthy person. Single parenthood with a woman who is bipolar but isn’t getting help for it is a nightmare. My mom had never hesitated to spank us if she felt we needed it but she became increasingly verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive as I got older.

She depended on me for adult friendships, even though I wasn’t an adult. She shared detailed information about her intimate relationships and often asked me for advice. At one point in time, she was being evicted from our home and had been given 30 days’ notice to leave. She spent 29 days driving around the city looking but hadn’t found anything. I’d begged her to buy a paper and look in it, but she’d refused. On day 30, I went to the store and bought the paper myself. We found a place to live and moved in the next day.

Our relationship was best friend one day, child-parent the next.  At thirteen, I was forced to sit down with my mother and explain to her that I couldn’t live that way. She needed to either make me her best friend and treat me as an adult or let me be a child and stop dumping on me.

I remember clearly being called into her room for some reason. She ranted and raved about how awful I was, how terrible a kid I was, how ungrateful I was, and how much of a brat I was until my cup of pain overflowed and I couldn’t take listening to it anymore and called her a five letter word that rhymes with itch.

She ordered me into the bathroom so she could wash my mouth out with soap. I refused. She drug me by my hair down the hall into the bathroom and sat on top of me. She tried squeezing my jaws to force them to open, but she’d trained me to ignore pain so I didn’t open my jaws. She then began slapping me back and forth across the face to get me to open my mouth. Eventually, seeing that she wasn’t going to stop, I bit her thumb. I didn’t know what else to do.

Her reaction was typical of a bully.

“You bit my thumb!”

Not a word about the abuse I’d just endured. She considered it her right to do to me whatever she wanted. I was the one in the wrong for daring to strike back.

I remember journaling “She hates me. I know it. She hates me.”

It was the only explanation I could come up with for the way that she treated me.

Needless to say, I grew up with a long and very unhealthy list of stories about who I was, about my potential in life, and about my relationships with other people. I believed, because I’d been told it so often in my life, that we didn’t have enough. Some people were given enough in life, and we just weren’t lucky enough to be in that category. If you had something, you’d better hold onto it because there wasn’t going to be more where that came from and you couldn’t risk sharing or you’d have less.

At the age of 11, I officially lost my virginity to a boy a little older than I was because I believed that the only real value I had was in my body. My dreams of becoming a great saint, of owning my own business, of having a normal family, and of becoming rich seemed impossibly far from my grasp.

I grew up believing that I could never be good enough, that I would always disappoint people, and that the surest sign someone cared about you was that they needed you. I grew up believing that what I wanted, felt, and thought didn’t matter. All that mattered was whether I pleased the people around me. I also grew up believing that if other people in my life were unhappy, it was my fault and I needed to fix it.

I accepted the mantle of responsibility for fixing people and for making them feel better without question, even as I resented it and wanted nothing more than to be free of it. I feared letting people get close to me because I feared hurting them, disappointing them, or failing to live up to their expectations of me. My people pleasing behavior led me to becoming whatever I thought other people wanted me to be in order to make them happy even if it made me miserable to do it. And I was miserable, but I was also determined to find a way out no matter how long it might take me to get there.

Today’s Homework: I Am…

You have picked up a lot of beliefs about yourself as you were growing up. Some of those are healthy and good. Some of those are negative beliefs that are silently working to hold you back from achieving your dreams. If you're going to free yourself to pursue these dreams, you must first identify those beliefs and begin to rewrite them.

Grab pen and paper, set the timer for 10 minutes, and write out everything that comes to mind, without judging or filtering it, that fills in the blank on the statement “I am”. Write the things that you like and the things you don’t. It’s all relevant.

When you’ve finished with the 10 minutes, sort those statements into two columns: Positive and Negative. 

Take those negative statements and rewrite them with a positive ending. This sheet is your daily affirmations list. I want you to post it to the group. You don’t need to tell people which statements started out as a negative and were rewritten positive unless you want to.

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