Storybook Hill Series | Part 3
After finding the house that instantly felt like home, we toured it, made an offer, and were rejected. Or at least, that’s what happened on paper. If you’re new to the Storybook Hill series, start with Part 1: The Day I Found My Storybook Hill or Part 2: When I Knew Storybook Hill Was Ours
And this is the part I think matters most when people talk about manifestation.
Because after the rejection, I didn’t start vision boarding harder.
I didn’t force positivity. I didn’t pretend I was detached. I didn’t start chanting into the moonlight while burning cinnamon sticks or whatever the internet is doing now.
I just quietly kept believing.
What Happened While We Waited
Instead of emotionally shutting the door, we started preparing our house to sell anyway.
Not because we had a different plan or because we suddenly knew how the story would end. The truth is, we had no more certainty than we did the day our offer was rejected.
What we did have was a growing sense that sitting still wasn’t the answer.
If Storybook Hill somehow came back around, I wanted to be ready. And if it didn’t, we’d have spent our time creating a home and a life we actually enjoyed instead of waiting around for the next chapter to begin. It felt like a win either way.
Something had simply shifted. For years, I had organized my life around what felt realistic. Around what made sense. Around what I could justify on paper. But after seeing that property, I started organizing my life around what felt true.
At the time, I thought we were getting our farmhouse ready to sell. Looking back, I wasn’t just preparing for a house. I was navigating one of the biggest identity shifts of my life.
For the next five months, life continued exactly as life tends to do.
The coffee shop still needed us. The kids still needed us. Bills still showed up. Laundry continued reproducing itself overnight. Nobody arrived carrying the keys to our future while inspirational music played softly in the background.
The story didn’t become cinematic. It just became…quieter.
And somehow, that ended up mattering more.
We Stopped Postponing Our Lives
For ten years, we had talked about replacing the deck. We had discussed plans, collected ideas, and postponed projects until some imaginary future version of our lives when everything would finally make sense.
Then suddenly, after seeing the house we thought we couldn’t have, we stopped postponing our own lives.
The deck came off and the patio went in. We installed a sauna and a cold plunge despite living in a farmhouse that still had approximately seven hundred other projects waiting for our attention.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, I realized something that made me deeply uncomfortable: maybe the life I wanted was never actually about the house. Maybe it was about finally giving myself permission to fully inhabit the life I already had.
There is something strangely healing about improving your current reality while still holding space for a future one.
For a long time, I thought those two things were mutually exclusive. That appreciating the life I had somehow meant giving up on the life I wanted.
I’ve since come to believe the opposite is true.
Maybe that’s where a lot of manifestation advice loses me. People talk about believing as if it means waiting around for something to land in your lap.
But waiting has never been my thing.
I’ve realized that I rarely start by asking, “What do I need to do?” I started, “Who do I need to become?”
What kind of person pays off six figures of debt?
What kind of person quits drinking?
What kind of person buys a coffee shop?
What kind of person lives in a house like that?
Then I start practicing being her long before the evidence shows up.
Not perfectly.
Not all at once.
Just enough that when the opportunity eventually arrives, it recognizes me too.
The Patio Summer
That summer will go down as one of the best summers we ever had at the farmhouse.
We sat outside almost every night, stretched out in the hammock, sweating in the sauna, plunging into the cow tank, and watching the sun set over the fields. We hosted friends, lingered around fires, and slowly built a life that felt more like us.
And that’s when it hit me.
The house had never really been the point. I wasn’t manifesting a house.
I was manifesting a feeling.
A slower life.
A simpler life.
A life that felt like enough.
And somewhere during that season, another shift happened.
For years, I had fallen asleep reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Not because I am particularly religious. Not because I was having profound nightly conversations with God.
More because Catholic guilt is surprisingly sticky.
“Our Father, who art in heaven…”
At some point those words became permanently embedded in my operating system. I could recite them automatically, the same way I still know every word to songs I haven’t heard since middle school.
It wasn’t really about religion anymore; it was about rhythm.
A Different Kind of Prayer
The familiar cadence of words I’d repeated so many times they no longer required thought. A mental pathway my brain knew how to follow when it was time to settle down for the night.
Then one night, without really deciding to, I replaced the prayer with something else. Every night when my head hit the pillow, I imagined myself living at Storybook Hill.
Continue to Part 4 | Manifesting a Dream House: When the House Came Back →
