When Your Vision of the Future Looks Nothing Like the Present

Throughout my life I’ve had strong intuitive flashes when big changes are coming up in my life. It’s hard to describe the fullness of it in words, but they’re like visions of what my future will look and feel like, a type of experience Martha Beck has dubbed “pre-membering”. 

The strongest instance of this was in 2017. I was settled in suburbia with two toddlers and a marriage like a chocolate easter bunny–neatly molded on the outside but hollow on the inside.

I had recently left my conservative Christian faith, and a well meaning family member recommended a book to me, in what I assumed was an attempt to bring me back into the fold. It was a memoir about a young couple, profoundly in love, who left their shameful pagan ways and converted to Christianity. The book was problematic for me in many ways, and when I finally committed to reading it, I felt a mixture of sadness for the author and his late wife and a tingle of regret and irritation that I had promised my family member I would check it out from the library in the first place. So it was quite a shock to have the story jump off the page and change the course of my life.

Have you ever missed a step while walking down a staircase? That's what it felt like when the book described in detail the lovers’ early, self-proclaimed ”pagan” days traveling the world on their beloved sailboat, and I KNEW it was describing my life! I felt in my bones as if it had already happened to me. It was a certainty. Not just the fact that I would live on a boat but that I would also one day enjoy more romance than I ever thought was possible.

Much like Mariah Carey in her 1990 debut album, I had a Vision of Love. It filled me with a delicious hope for my future, but I had no idea how it would possibly come to pass. Just like I had done since I was 21 when I became aware that I was trapped in a loveless marriage, I made a most saintly attempt at contentedness. That’s what had gotten me through the previous 8 years, and I made the mistake of thinking that if I simply redoubled my efforts, I could push the vision to the back of my mind and file it away as another strange, mystical experience. 

Thankfully, it was a persistent little premonition, and no amount of playing the dutiful suburban housewife could drive it from my consciousness. The change was set in motion, and I had no idea that a year later my then-husband and I would be in the market for a seaworthy cruising boat, much less that I’d soon be turning down the opportunity to sail it off to the tropics, choosing instead to ask for a divorce and blow up my perfect, hollow, confectionery life.