Where has she been? What has she been up to?

It started when I was four years old... I stood outside in the snow with my mother and stared at the Aurora Borealis that stretched across Alaska's northern sky. My mother told me that the world was God's gift to me and to dream big because I could be anything I wanted to be.

I believed her.

As a result, I became the most ambitious four year old on Alaska's southern coast. I was going to fly. My days were spent in capes embroidered with Super Woman's logo and crafting paper airplanes that flew top-secret missions for my brother's GI Joes.

I lost that dream after my first heart surgery when I was fifteen. The months that followed proved to be more difficult as my father, grandmother, and step-father passed away. I turned to my faith for answers. I felt convinced that all of this happened because it was God's will and that He wanted me to pursue a different path in life.

So I meandered through the next ten years. I hoped to serve a mission for the LDS Church but was denied due to my health. I hoped to find my "calling" and new career by remaining diligent to the Lord and taking general college classes when finances permitted. However, after losing insurance coverage, work became my foremost priority. My education was placed on the back-burner and I committed myself to 80 hour work weeks to support the financial demands of upcoming surgeries. My life became work, work work...and the impact this lifestyle had on my spiritual and emotional self quickly made itself evident. I became severly depressed and developed an addiction that lasted too long. After years of living like this, life became a burden and I began therapy when death became a real solution.

In five years, I experienced losses that take most people a lifetime to see. I didn't lose these things by any merit of my own... I was a good kid. I wasn't lazy, made good grades, was firm in my faith and very committed to my dreams and goals. I was only 15 and young enough to have parents and grandparents around for a few more decades. In the end, the greatest loss I ever experienced, the only one for which I was entirely responsible, was losing myself. It took this final loss to learn that I deserve to give myself more than I have over the last ten years.

I'm doing well now and have learned that, despite the huge disappointments and heart aches of my past, I can still live passionately. I've learned that I can live a life that isn't determined by my health or choices a higher power would have me make. I often think back to that little girl in Alaska and want her to know it's not the dream or God who will define her - it's the journey. Learning that I am the captain of my ship has truly been my most rewarding and empowering lesson.

What if life isn't defined by what we've wished for and lost, but instead by the moments we spend getting from each of these places to the next?

This is my journey.