I Never Could Have Imagined This

I've been sitting with this one for a few days because I wanted to get it right.

Last week I got to do something I genuinely never thought would happen to me. I had dinner at Club 33.

If you know, you know. If you don't, Club 33 is a private members club inside Disneyland that has existed since Walt Disney himself opened it. It's tucked away in New Orleans Square, behind an unmarked door, and for most of Disney's history it was one of the best kept secrets in the park. A reservation requires a membership that has a waitlist measured in years. It is, by any measure, one of the most exclusive dining experiences in the world.

And I got to be there. With my husband. With our best friend. With my sister-in-law.

I got to be there with people who love me.

The meal was extraordinary. Every course felt like it was made to be remembered. The kind of food where you slow down mid-bite and just look at the person across from you because you both know something special is happening.

But honestly, the food wasn't even the thing.

The thing was watching Fantasmic from the balcony.

If you've seen Fantasmic, you know it's already magical from the ground. The water, the fire, the music, the way it builds to something that somehow always hits you right in the chest no matter how many times you've seen it.

Watching it from up there, with a glass in my hand and the people I love most beside me, I felt something shift.

I looked around at my husband, our best friend, my sister-in-law. I thought about where I've been. I thought about the version of me who spent so long believing that joy like this wasn't available to him. That rooms like this, nights like this, weren't for people like me.

And here we were.

I didn't grow up thinking I'd ever sit in a place like Club 33. I didn't grow up thinking I'd have a husband who looks at me the way he does. I didn't grow up thinking I'd have a best friend who shows up the way ours does, or a chosen family that feels this solid and this safe.

I didn't grow up imagining any of this.

And that's exactly the thing I keep coming back to.

Life surprised me. In the best possible way. In ways I didn't have the imagination or the permission to dream about when I was younger.

I think about that a lot in this work. I think about all the families who are standing at the edge of something, telling themselves it's not for them. That they can't afford it. That it's too complicated. That magic like this belongs to someone else.

I want to tell them what I know now.

Let life surprise you.

You don't have to be able to imagine it for it to be yours. You just have to take one step toward it and see what happens.

I'm so glad I did.