Just Guyton

This morning I walked five miles.

Then, because apparently I have become one of those people, I did twenty minutes of functional strength training.

Before coffee.

I don’t know who I am anymore either.

But now I’m sitting here with my coffee, thinking about promises.

Not the big dramatic promises we make to other people. The quiet ones we make to ourselves.

I’ve made a lot of those.

And somewhere along the way, I actually started keeping them.

When I was about ten years old, I knew I wanted to be a writer.

There was never really a Plan B.

That doesn’t mean I had some beautifully mapped-out plan for becoming one. There was no timeline. No vision board. No five-year plan with little boxes to check off.

There was just this thing inside me that said:

I’m going to be a writer.

And then life happened.

Boy, did life happen.

Years passed. Then more years passed. There were children and marriages and jobs and bills and mistakes and survival and all the other things life likes to throw into the middle of plans you were absolutely certain you had made.

But I never stopped wanting to write.

Years ago, I knew someone who was incredibly talented with music. They dreamed about being in a band and standing on stages, and I genuinely believed they were good enough to do it.

Then, sometime in our late thirties, they told me they’d given up on the dream.

I remember feeling incredibly sad.

Not because I thought everyone has to chase the same dream forever. We’re allowed to change. We’re allowed to discover that something we wanted at twenty isn’t what we want at forty.

But they had once wanted it so badly.

And I remember thinking about my own dream.

I didn’t know if becoming a writer would take another year or another twenty.

I didn’t know what it would look like when I finally got there.

I just knew one thing.

I wasn’t going to be the one who killed the dream.

There were other promises I needed to keep, too.

Some much harder than becoming a writer.

At some point, I looked at the person I had been and realized I needed to make changes.

I have daughters who knew a version of me that my grandchildren will never fully know.

Their mother was struggling. She made mistakes. She didn’t always get things right.

I can’t go backward and change the mother my daughters had when they were little.

That’s one of the hardest things about growing as a person. Becoming better doesn’t give you a time machine.

Rude, honestly.

There are definitely a few years I’d like another crack at.

But I could decide what happened next.

I could make sure my grandchildren knew a different version of me.

I could make sure my daughters got to know the woman I became afterward.

And maybe, most importantly, I could finally become somebody I could count on.

That’s what keeping promises to myself looks like these days.

Sometimes it’s enormous.

It’s changing my life.

It’s becoming the woman I wanted my grandchildren to know.

It’s finally writing the words I always said I would write.

And sometimes it’s Tuesday morning.

It’s getting up and walking five miles.

It’s doing twenty minutes of strength training when coffee is sitting there looking like a much more reasonable life choice.

It’s sitting down afterward with that coffee and writing anyway.

I used to think dreams were about arriving somewhere.

Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe they’re also about continuing to choose something even when nobody is standing there making you do it.

Nobody was going to come looking for ten-year-old me and demand the book she promised herself.

Nobody was going to knock on my door and ask why I hadn’t become the woman I said I wanted to become.

Those promises were mine.

So was the choice to keep them.

And now, after all these years, I can finally say something I don’t think I could have said for a very long time:

I trust myself to show up for me.

I became a writer.

I became a grandmother my grandchildren get to know differently.

I’m still becoming a lot of things.

And apparently one of them is a woman who voluntarily strength trains before coffee.

We’re all going to need some time to process that one.

But I’m learning that dreams don’t necessarily expire because we get older.

And promises don’t stop counting because they took longer than we expected to keep.

Sometimes the promise you make at ten is still waiting for you decades later.

Sometimes the person you promised yourself you’d become takes years to meet.

That’s okay.

Some promises take a morning to keep.

Some take almost a lifetime.

They still count.