Short answer. Yes.
Well, this one does. I’m sure some don’t. This wouldn’t be a very sensible blog if the answer were no though.
Longer answer: That’s essentially what this blog is going to be about, and it’s complicated and there’s many reasons to it, and I don’t have all the answers, but this has been a dream of mine for a very long time.
So let me explain the dream and how it began.
I’ve always loved helping people and unlike a lot of other authors, I’m an extrovert. Possibly an ambivert at times, but I am certainly not an introvert.
Since I was young, I was used to a bustling house where there were plenty of people to spend time with. I also had a mother who would welcome in any other kids who needed somewhere safe, caring and welcoming to be. She would feed us all, no matter how much it cost her.
And she always cooked extra for dinner, just in case someone walked in the door at the last minute and she wanted to invite them to stay. It invariably led to us eating leftovers for lunch, and sometimes even breakfast, more often than not. But it was a way of life I grew used to.
Mostly, that people were safe in my house, no matter what was going on in their lives. People were accepted for who they were.
One of the harshest parts of growing up for me was discovering that others aren’t like this.
It also took being in my adult years for me to work out that I wanted to be creative above all else. I tried to do a maths and physics degree, and while I could manage to understand it and I was passable at it, my heart wasn’t in it. I then tried to be an accountant, and while this also wasn’t what my heart wanted, it has proved useful, and will hopefully come back up in future blog posts.
Most importantly, I finally worked out that I had been telling stories in one way or another since I was tiny. So I told some more.
I quickly discovered the world isn’t particularly kind to brand new creative folks. There’s bills to pay, a muse to figure out how to wrangle, and a lot of people look down on being creative for some very silly reasons that I’m also not going to go into today, other than to say they’re very silly indeed and I don’t agree with them.
Being creative is one of the things that makes humans, well… human. It’s how we express so many parts of our souls, hearts and minds.
Without creativity we might as well only exist to survive.
If you can’t at least, to some degree, agree with this statement, you’re probably reading the wrong blog. None of what I’m trying to do will make much sense without the idea that creativity is one of the most important pursuits in our lives.
Anyway, back to the point slightly. I’ve gone off on a small tangent. The point is that all these things add up to make my goal make sense.
I want to make it easier for creatives to be creative. I want to help practically, financially, and I want to recreate that safe, accepting, nurturing environment my mother provided when I was young in order for others to flourish.
My first visions of a large building full of creatives that I manage and teach in came to me like many things do.
As a dream.
In this dream there were some friends who helped me run it, and students, or people we were wanting to help, for lack of better ways to describe them. We worked on projects in collaboration, separately, and just generally worked together to make the world a better place through story in one format or another, including, music and dance and painting etc.
It took several more days for me to realise that this idea excited me way beyond any other.
At the time, well over fifteen years ago, when I told people they laughed at me. No one took the idea seriously.
The weight of life, the negativity of the people around me, and not managing to get my own creative career off the ground squashed the dream, for a while, at least.
And then I had my wake up moment. The moment I decided that my life had to move toward my dreams again and I was going to have to make it. I think all people have these moments in them, and I’ll talk more about what caused my wake up moment another time. But it happened in June 2019. June 2nd to be very precise.
It took me a little longer to figure out exactly what I wanted to do about this wake up moment, but I clearly remember staying up very late only 3 weeks later to put together a plan for the first step. I wasn’t ready to think about it getting me the big creative retreat yet, but it was a step toward making my dreams a reality.
Over the next few years, I took quite a few steps, shedding what had been holding me back, finding other creatives who understood me and a support group to get there. My own creative career started to flourish and make the idea of more possible again, until I finally dared to utter my dream again to someone.
I dared to tell my now husband, Bryan. And unlike everyone before him, he was enthusiastic about the idea. He asked questions and, most importantly, he believed it would happen.
At some point around this time I began to look at possibilities finally. I quickly discovered that not only was Scotland far cheaper than many places in the world to buy large houses for creative retreats. But they also had a massive amount of castles that had been maintained as homes or hotels.
On top of that I discovered one very important element. I like Scotland more than many other places I’ve visited.
So, my biggest dream, and the one I’m aiming for, is to buy a Scottish castle, turn it into a creative retreat, and help other creatives fill this world with wonderful stories.
There’s still a long way for me to go to get there, and thank you for also reading this far with me. I hope you’ll come back and keep reading as I blog about my journey toward the castle. And hopefully beyond.
You’re cordially invited to join me on my quest to raise the funds, find the right castle and get started with filling it full of creatives.
I hope me being open, honest, and letting you in on this quest will be inspiring and help you too. For me, putting this into words helps. It gives me a tangible feel to a very large dream. And a first step.
I’ll be back on Thursday to blog more about turning a dream into goals, and figuring out the actual goal a little more. For now, I think this is long enough.
If you have any dreams and goals that scare the pants off you, but you’re going to try to do it anyway, I would love to hear about them. Maybe we can cheer each other on to victory and success, and much celebrating!