The dreams we've given up

“You don’t have to explain your dreams, they belong to you”- Paulo Coelho

These days, it seems as if we sleep in one world only to wake up in another. Our reality changes overnight. Everything we've always known; we've seen it change in a second. On certain days, we wake up to find the world that we know so well doesn’t look familiar anymore. On other occasions, we wake up on a realization that we are the ones who have changed, when everything around us is still the same. The world keeps changing and we keep on changing. And on days like these, it feels like we’re fighting for a chance to dream, rather than fighting for our dreams.

Life is a funny thing. Sometimes, it forces us to give up on the dreams we kept on chasing for so long, the dreams that used to keep us up all night, the ones we thought would ought to define us one day. And as young adults, we wonder why would anyone defer paths to choose a different road than the one he had planned out to take and had always fantasized about. Truth is, there are so many reasons to choose the easy way out and give up on your dreams. We might give up some dreams in order to stay with people we love, or to live in a country we’re attached to. Sometimes, we walk away voluntarily because we don’t think we’re good enough, or because we fail and guarantee ourselves that it’s not worth getting up and trying again, thus living in the shadows of the ‘I couldn’t make it’ and ‘I wasn’t good enough’. At times, we get scared to take that extra step that will lead us right where we want to be. Doubt keeps us back, and the haunting possibilities of what we might lose in the process absorb us. Sometimes, we don’t get enough support from the people we want to see excited for us. Truth is, people you’ve known for a long period could have a hard time accepting your success, for both of you are coming from the same place while they still haven’t moved an inch. Most of the time, we wait for others to motivate us, to believe in us and support us in order to invest in the effort needed to achieve the maddest dreams. Perhaps the road we should take will change us, differ our beliefs from the things we’ve come to normalize. Society could hold us captive, brainwashing us into believing how silly it is to chase our dreams and go after bigger ambitions. So, thirty years from now, we find ourselves recalling how we wanted to be the sky and yet we settled down, rooted for earth and stuck our feet deep in it, convincing ourselves that we were never made to fly. It’s a sad story perhaps, for people who deserve so much more than just a series of regrets to hold on to.

So, I say to you: giving up on a dream is only acceptable if we’re willing to replace it with a bigger one and follow greater ambitions. To dream is to be free, to dream is to feel, to be passionate. Be brave enough to run fast towards where you want to be, a couple years from now. When you feel encumbered in the room that society locked you in, when you feel these four walls are confining you more and more, with limits that are not yours, all you have to do is look up, and keep on dreaming. No one should be talked out of the dreams that bring magic to their world. Don’t let yourself label them as ‘the dreams you’ve given up on’… You’ve fantasized about them for so long, and they have kept you from turning into cold bones and an empty soul. Hold on to your dreams, for they make you ‘’you’’, and giving them up would mean giving up on yourself.