Practical Manifesting — A Real-Life Journey from “Dream It” to “Be It”
I was not born into a life that inspired taking risks or embarking on new adventures. Nor did it inspire magical thinking.
I grew up in solidly middle-class suburban Philadelphia, the awkward daughter of children of Sicilian-Italian immigrants. Norristown, Pennsylvania, certainly was not a fertile breeding ground for the expat surfer, experienced traveler and nature geek I am now, living my best life in a charismatic and diverse community of people on Portugal’s rugged western coast.
It is eleven years ago to the day I left my urban life in New York City, and the start of a year in which I will turn 50. Not once have I given my old life barely a backward glance, and I certainly have no regrets.
When I decided to change my life completely, I was single and nearly 40 years old, and everything I owned fit into a black Fiat Punto.
Now I own a colorful and bright bungalow by the sea and a dog, am happily partnered to a handsome and kind man, and have built a life that — even in the midst of a global pandemic that’s drastically changed just about everything — is happier and more fulfilling than I ever imagined.
Humble Yet Wishful
Growing up I lived in a fantasy world, my nose buried in fiction novels, my head in the clouds and my hands writing long, meandering stories of how I wished my life would be.
I always felt slightly removed from what was going on around me, and yet at the same time I had a sixth sense about what was going on beneath the surface of things. Now people might call this latter characteristic “intuition,” but I didn’t know it at the time.
I also had a big imagination that caused me both great fear and anxiety about the world but also imbued me with the belief that there was something better out there, though I wasn’t sure what or where it was.
To this day I don’t know what compelled me to take such a leap of faith not only first to move across the country, but later across the wide Atlantic Ocean, what gave me the confidence or conviction to pull off my current state of existence.
I was a second-generation Sicilian-Italian-American daughter. My people left Europe for a better life in the United States and certainly didn’t ever want to migrate back to the Old World. People I encountered in my early life just didn’t do stuff like that.
Instead, they did what my older sister did — married a local guy in her early 20s and had a gaggle of kids, raising her family while her husband worked his way up in my father’s corrugated packaging business, which he himself had built from the bottom up.
I watched my sister do everything “right” to live the mythical American dream — moving from a starter townhouse to a much bigger home on a cul-de-sac to accommodate her growing family, adding a swimming pool and a series of latest-model SUVs to a slowly amassed modest fortune that could send all the kids to college and create wealth to pass to succeeding generations.
Even when I was young this vision didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t want to spend all my money on a white wedding, a big house or a brood of kids. I didn’t want to live in the vicinity of where I grew up my whole life. And I distinctly remember thinking that I never wanted to have a 9-to-5 job as soon as I knew what a 9-to-5 job was.
Unwitting Manifestation
Perhaps it had something to do with my imagination or intuition, but I have been blessed with the amazing gift of being able to manifest what I wanted at crucial times in my life.
When I was in high school and a massive music fan, I had the simple wish that someday I would have all the free tickets I ever wanted for all the concerts of my favorite bands.
Fast forward about seven years later when I was the editor of the weekly entertainment magazine at Arizona State University, where I was attending graduate school.
An indie-rock enthusiast and burgeoning musician myself by then, I had a deal with the local concert promoters to give away free tickets on campus when all my favorite indie-rock performers would come through town. Of course I always took some off the top for me and my own friends.
And just like that, my teen-aged wish was granted.
“If you can dream it you can be it.” It sounds trite and ridiculous — the tag line for a Hallmark-sponsored movie you are embarrassed to be watching on a lazy Saturday afternoon. But it’s absolutely true. I am living proof.
The free-ticket gig isn’t the only example of this type of simple manifestation happening in my life in the most unintentional ways.
Take living in New York City, which also was a dream I had for a long time. I had a poster of the New York City skyline lit up at night on my bedroom wall when I was a teenager. Though I moved west after college — first to Phoenix, Arizona, and then San Francisco, California — I never forgot about my love of the Big Apple.
In 2006, the technology-news service for which I was writing in San Francisco asked me unexpectedly if I would move to New York to replace someone leaving a post there. My mother had recently died, my long-term relationship had ended, and my family was still in suburban Philadelphia. The move would bring me closer to them and their emotional support, something I desperately needed at the time.
Again, without any action on my part, my longtime wish was granted.
Reality Bites
But in the end, NYC wasn’t for me. During my last year in that magical city that is only now limping toward its former glory after it was ravaged by COVID-19, I befriended a Dublin-born woman who was manager of a popular restaurant which had as its investors both a wealthy socialite friend of mine as well as the late James Gandolfini from The Sopranos fame. She also happened to be my neighbor in the fashionable downtown Manhattan NoLIta neighborhood, and we became besties for a while.
Her job gave her street cred with all the coolest restaurants and bars around town, and we would taxi around the city securing tables and free drinks at all the best places. We wined and dined in speakeasies and chic places frequented by celebrities that a former fat girl from suburban Philly had no business being in.
Even as I lived this insanely fun life, I suffered a raging case of imposter syndrome. I did not deserve in any way, shape or form to live such a fun, glamorous and charmed existence.
In my mind, I was a shamefully overweight single woman in her late thirties trolling around NYC from hotspot to hotspot with her skinny mate, the ugly best friend riding shotgun as she picked up guy after guy and got sometimes quite alarmingly drunk.
I was the one who put her in taxis or made sure the guy she was going home with wasn’t a creep, then walked the empty streets of SoHo or the West Village or TriBeCa to my NoLIta apartment alone in the early hours of the morning.
Sure there were nights when I had my own adventures, and I met tons of fascinating and interesting people who are still friends to this day and who made my experience vibrant and valuable.
But by the age of 38 — when I was terminally single, had run up $20,000 in credit-card debt and made the decision to finally leave NYC in the rearview — I was completely done with it.
I had visited Portugal on a holiday for the first time in September 2008, and the second time two months later. I talked about the place so much and was so miserable in New York by the beginning of 2009 that a blunt male buddy of mine finally said to me, “Why don’t you just shut up and stop talking about it and just move there?”
And so eventually, I did. And somehow, even without a solid plan as to how I would earn a living, where I would live, or what on earth I would do once I got there, things just fell into place.
Making It All Happen
I think once you make a decision about something, if it’s the right one, the universe finds a way. I was done with New York City, even though I had found some type of beauty and even a bizarre redemption in my life there.
The last year I lived in New York was in Red Hook, Brooklyn, an artsy neighborhood by the riverfront that was not easily accessible by public transportation. Because of this, the ambience there was one more of a local community or village than a big city, and I dropped easily into living a small-town way of life against the backdrop of the greater metropolis.
At the time I was one of the rare middle-class residents of NYC who had a car, and as I had started to learn to surf in Portugal, I began making the hour-long drive to Long Island to hone my nascent surfing skills on summer afternoons after work.
I would cycle around Brooklyn and even into Manhattan in good weather rather than take my car or public transportation to be more connected to the outdoors and to the elements, to feel the environment and soul of the city on my skin.
In short, I was making changes to pave the way for a new type of living, one away from the concrete jungle and its material excess to a lifestyle that would allow me to live more in harmony with nature, where I could exist with less money and consumer purchases and thus simplify the capitalist life to which I was accustomed.
I had already begun making decisions to have this kind of life before I even knew what it would look like. So once I finally quit my job and cashed in some savings to fund a two-month exploratory trip to Portugal in October 2009 — freelancing here and there but without enough money to make a sustainable living — it didn’t matter what would happen next.
Even if how I would earn money was still a question mark, I managed to secure a temporary place to live with a new friend during that trial run at living abroad. This gave me enough confidence to, with a hopeful heart, put my stuff in storage in January 2010 and buy a one-way ticket, with plans to make the big move at the end of the month.
Less than a week before my flight, someone from a technology publication who knew me from my previous full-time work called me and said he’d heard I had quit my job and was available to freelance. I said that was true, but I was moving to Portugal in a few days.
Location didn’t matter, he said. Was I free to write daily news stories for them for a monthly stipend that was plenty more than enough to fund my new down-sized life? Hell, yes!
And so, that part of my life was resolved, without me having to lift a finger. I had a place to live, I had the money, and off I went. Again, I made a wish and it was granted.
There is No “Secret”
There’s no recipe for practical manifesting, no special “Secret”-style meditation or thoughts or rituals that can make whatever you want to happen in your life happen.
There are, however, mindset changes you can make about your life to make your dreams or wishes come true, and a certain element of magic or luck.
Yes, I do believe that some unnamed force outside of ourselves exists, though I think magic or luck is something we make more than something that happens to us.
Perhaps it can be explained scientifically by the relationship between inertia and momentum. Inertia is the principle that an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Momentum is what keeps that object going once it gets moving.
To create real change for yourself to accomplish your goals and dreams, something must spur you into action. It could be a simple dream you have, a wish you desire to come true, or some unforeseen event that makes you re-evaluate your life.
But the momentum that keeps you moving is created not only by you, but also by the unseen and helpful forces that already set you in motion in the first place.
You also have to have an open mind as to what that dream and new life will look like once it does happen, let go of any preconceived notions you had about the situation, and be happy with the reality of the experience with both its ups and downs.
Was my life perfect when I finally moved to Portugal 11 years ago? Hell, no. I still had many expectations to live up to, traumatic experiences to overcome, relationships that injured me, and people and I loved and lost along the way.
But in the end is the life I have now worth it? Without question or hesitation, a resounding “YES.”
Your goals and dreams are waiting for you and aren’t as difficult to achieve as you think. Just like a long journey, your new life begins with merely a single step on the path to manifesting the rest.