I Keep Waiting to Wake Up

Sometimes I think I'm dreaming.

Or living in a movie. Any moment now I'll wake up and realize none of it was real.

I'm sitting in a WeWork in San Francisco. Coffee on the desk. Laptop open. Voices around me in that startup-office cadence I used to only hear through podcasts.

I'm looking around. Observing. Trying to take it all in.

Little Me

If you'd told little Martina, that one day she'd be working out of San Francisco, flying to New York, taking meetings in Hawaii, she would have laughed. Or thought you were lying. Or just shrugged the way you shrug at things that obviously aren't going to happen to you.

I grew up watching American movies and series like they were postcards from a place I'd never go. Skylines I'd never see. Buildings I'd never walk into. Lives that looked nothing like mine.

And here I am.

In one of those buildings.

In one of those lives.

There's a butterfly feeling in my stomach almost constantly now. The kind you get the night before something good. Except it's not the night before. It's just… the days. The weeks. The months.

I don't want to lose it.

I keep telling myself: don't get used to this. Don't let any of this become normal. Stop. Look up. Notice.

I think a lot of people, when they finally get into the rooms they wanted to be in, stop seeing the rooms. They start optimizing. Negotiating. Planning the next thing. The wonder gets traded for momentum.

I'd rather be a little inefficient and keep the wonder.

Reality Check

But I want to be honest about what this is.

This isn't an "I made it" post. I haven't made it.

I'm not on top of the world. I'm not even close to where I want to be.

I'm just on top of my own dreams right now, and that turns out to be a very different thing.

There's no scoreboard. No moment where someone hands you a certificate and says, congratulations, this is it.

There's just the strange experience of catching yourself living a version of your life that, at some earlier point, was unimaginable. And realizing you didn't notice when the line got crossed.

MOMA, for real?

In a few days, my SFMOMA moment arrives. The portrait. The exhibition. Female founders, on display, in a museum I've walked past on visits and tried not to look too impressed by.

I keep thinking: I'm going to wake up. Right before it. Or during it. Or after.

But I don't think I will.

This one keeps refusing to dissolve.

The End

I don't have a tidy ending for this. I'm not sure I want one.

Sometimes the life you're living is the one you didn't think was yours, and the only honest response is to keep looking around, keep noticing, and keep being a little bit shocked by it.

That's where I am.

Pinching myself, in a WeWork, in San Francisco.

Still here.

Still real.