Published by: Jadelynn Arnigo
Date Published: October 10, 2025
Time Published: 12:04 PM
Category: Prose
Theme: The quiet grief of letting go of expectations that were never fully yours, and the painful reckoning between hope, circumstance, and reality.
No one talks about the pain of unlearning a dream you never had to learn in the first place—it just existed. It was there before you could name it, stitched into the way others spoke about your future, the way you were praised for being promising, gifted, bound for something big. You didn’t ask for it. You simply wore it. And somewhere along the way, it started feeling like the truth.
Innate, they said—your talent, your potential, your “easy path” to success. But the world doesn’t care about what comes naturally when reality begins to ask for more than what you can give. You start to realize that no amount of trying makes the climb any less steep. That no matter how hard you push, some doors remain shut—not because you don’t want them badly enough, but because you’ve run out of ways to get in. Because wanting isn’t always enough.
They said that dreaming is free. But no one tells you how expensive it is to chase it. How heavy it becomes when it starts costing you time, energy, peace, and parts of yourself you were never ready to give. No one warns you that sometimes, dreams are designed for people with more—more time, more fortune, more support, more access. No one told me that I should’ve dreamed within what I could afford. That I should’ve measured hope against circumstance.
Of all the heartbreaks I’ve known, this one stings the most. Not because someone left, or something ended, but because a version of me—one I truly believed in—had to die. The life I imagined won’t be mine. And no one is to blame. Not the people who believed in me. Not even myself.
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