How to hold onto dreams & grieve the ones that didn't come true

A reflection for anyone losing hope & feeling like things aren't so great right now

Back in February, I came across this piece by Giulia, and I heard myself. She writes in a style similar to how college me did, with a similar pull and a similar longing, and even a similar determined attempt at optimism through a lens of acceptance and presence in the path she is choosing.

I wanted to write a companion piece, not to respond, but to offer what I can from a woman, a similar woman of dreams and creativity, facing the same need to remind myself of dreams, some 20+ years into the journey.

Having dreams was all I felt like I had at times. I don’t think my convictions about them were strong enough in my college years like Giulia, but I knew at my core, in my essence, what was for me, how I wanted to be, who I wanted to be, and where I could go.

Though it was not as loud as I wish it was (my regrets as I look back at my early adulthood are not believing my inner knowing, not trusting my intuition, trying to mold to other’s opinions, and not telling certain men to fuck off sooner,) but the inner knowing of a dream, many dreams, kept me alive and kept me moving in the direction of those dreams.

And one day, the dreams do start chasing you. Much of the last few years has had moments of me thinking, I dreamed all of this.

But the path here is dotted with challenges, moments where our belief in something better being possible is really quiet (if not gone altogether), where we have to survive. I cannot begin to imagine how it must feel to be a young adult right now. I went to college in 2004, and times were hopeful. Sure, we all had terrible body image and could not be thin enough, but there was no sense of collective grief and pain and suffering that I, and many others, feel now that lends itself to a sense of hopelessness, confusion, and existential dread. We were not on little screens all day, and only social media technology at the time felt clunky but fun (I was an early adopter of platforms, and my Myspace was Myspace.com/joinmyfanclub.) Content was not king. We lived with disposable cameras, less inflation, and hope.

So I write to also share how we cannot give up on our dreams, no matter where we are. I think the feeling of holding on even though everything feels hard and it all sucks can apply to anyone, at any age, especially right now.

A manifesto as reminder.

If nothing else, we need to have a manifesto to live by.

It can change, but to hold onto something is to hold onto anything. A manifest grounds us and gives us something to always be returning to.

Write yours somewhere you can read it over and over. It can even help to write it over and over every morning until it sticks. I write mine most mornings or often during a journaling session. I repeat it like a prayer.

Career dreams are actually more than a career.

We can get really hung up on this idea of a “career” as if it is something we choose and settle into. Certainly, what we pick to “do” or use as a means to survive in a world that requires we work and pay to exist colors a great deal of where we go and who we get to be.

However, it’s not as tightly wound and concrete as you think. A more fluid, amorphous idea of what one desires is usually better suited, as it allows for many flavors of the same theme. Themes are something most of us have, no matter where we are or what we are doing.

My themes have always been thoughtfulness (sub themes: art, creativity, innovation, and being human), whether it was in the food work I was doing, my yoga work, clinical therapy, or my writing as an author.

I will say, what we choose to do encompasses a lot more parts of how we want to live a life. What you want to do or the industry you want to be in might dictate what city you live in, who you are around, what work/life balance you are afforded, how much financial success you have, how much creative time you are allowed.

So when we think of career dreams, everyone has to decide if the career dream will carry the rest, or will you select for the other parts that matter to you, and allow the career to come? For example, it was more important for me to live in NYC after college than it was to find a job, and allow the job to take me where it was located.

What we prioritize is who we are. It is also who we become.

You get to decide what you prioritize at any point in your life. So much more comes on the other side of those choices.

You will redirect and course correct, over and over.

People will change their “work” in many ways and careers over and over. It is never too late. We have one life, and we get to choose how we want to live it, so be as many people as you would like.

You get to evolve. You get to change. Give yourself the freedom to revise time and time again.

Find beauty and meaning in the mundane; it will save you.

I’ve found the business of having dreams is often the work of something out there, beyond our current reach. By being focused on where we are going, we sometimes forget that life is happening for us, right now. Your day-to-day might not be what you want, but it is your life. It is yours more than anything else, and honoring it as sacred will take you far.

As Giulia also notes, the process is the work. I would add to that, noticing the present in the process is a big part of how we go on.

I can’t say it gets better or easier.

It might actually get worse and better, all at the same time.

Without fail, bigger, more horrible, and more painful things will happen. The losses will be greater, the grief heavier, but the joys, the stability in oneself, and being grounded in who you are will also increase. You learn to care less about flippant things and, if you’re lucky, hone in more on what matters.

There is not some magic place we arrive at with age. The longing for something else doesn’t leave most of us, and yet, we learn to live alongside it.

We become more expansive, and expansiveness goes both ways. Pain and pleasure are waves on the same ocean.

Age can cause many of us to shift from hope and optimism to regret and sorrow. We think more of days gone by than the time we still have left. This trap keeps us from claiming what is right in front of us.

It was not until I experienced an untimely and tragic death that I realized how important taking action on your dreams really is. Your dreams will not come to you, no matter how much manifesting you do. I have always believed fate only takes you so far. There will be doors life gives you.

The real work is learning to recognize the doors and to walk through them when presented with them. It is also about being kind to former versions of yourself that did not see the doors, wasn’t confident enough to walk through them, or did not believe such lives were possible for them.

We humans have a way of looking back and assuming we could have known more than we did at any moment. We believe we could have done better or chosen better, and yet, the you that was in that moment, could only do what they actually did. There are factors beyond our immediate comprehension that play into what we do and why or how we do it.

A Toni Morrison quote comes to mind: “sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. but the grandeur of life is that attempt. it’s not about that solution. it is about being as fearless as one can & behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances.”

You don’t have to do this alone.

The work of having dreams and working towards them can be lonely and difficult, but you cannot (nor should you) try to do this life thing alone. I know I mentioned that things get better and worse all at once sometimes, but the way we navigate life and uncertainty, pain and difficulty, is to lean into the care and love of those around us. We have to keep coming back to the people and spaces that hold us.

I’ve lost enough to tell you that love is a salve for the struggling in the journey. I fear we have too often thought of love only in a romantic sense. In A Therapeutic Journey, Alain de Botton wrote the word love “is so fatefully associated with romance and sentimentality that we overlook its critical role in helping us keep faith with life at times of overwhelming psychological confusion and sorrow.”

Go where the love is. It is always the place to begin again.

Dreams can keep us going.

So yes, many things might be bad, for many people, in macro and micro ways right now.

I hold space for existential and collective dread every week in my office, and sit with individuals as they work through the grief. Grief from loss, but more often the grief of dreams that didn’t come true, of lives they didn’t live.

This is a particular type of grief. There are ways to cope with this grief (mentioned here.)

I cannot write this as someone who just wants you all to believe and keep a dream. Life is random and unfair. It is filled with loss. It is also filled with wonder and awe.

I hold them both. I hold the sad days and the losses and the injustices as tenderly as I can. I’ve learned to live with love and to see what is working and what we do have. I’ve learned we often have to do the best we know, as we know, with what we have at any given time.

I keep making vision boards, I keep writing new ideas in journals, I keep revisiting my manifesto, I keep turning my face towards the sun when I can, and I work really hard to look for hope even in the most hopeless of times. I’ve found friendships, and the people around you will help hold you when you feel you cannot hold yourself.

In January of 2024, I shared, “this year has not taken us and that alone is enough to celebrate.”

To still be here, to still be dreaming, is the win. That is how we keep going. So, season after season, year after year, we keep showing up for ourselves and each other.