Grieving the Death of Unmanifested Dreams
FULL STOP. This blog post is long. There aren’t going to be lots of beautifully curated photos and there isn’t a step-by-step how to.
What this post is though is a deep, extremely raw and honest account of one of the most painful aspects of the healing journey. We focus so much on the letting go of things that no longer service us without talking about the immense pain that comes along with that. During your healing journey, you are going to grieve. What you will actually grieve will vary for each person’s journey and the season they are in. With growth, comes death. There is no way around it and for that, I am sorry.
You’re going to experience loss. Loss of people, loss of comfort, loss of certainty as you move into uncharted waters, the loss of the life you once knew. Some losses will burn deeply while others won’t feel like a loss at all after the initial shock.
You are going to see, feel and mourn the death of your old self multiple times over as you peel back the layers to reveal the real you that has been hidden under all those layers of hurt, limiting thought patterns and suppressed emotions.
You are also going to mourn the death of dreams that you clung dearly to for as long as you could until little by little they morphed into painful hallucinations that you felt shackled to.
One of the hardest deaths that I have experienced during my healing journey was the death of the dream of spending the rest of my life with someone that I loved with every fiber of my being. Burying the old versions of me could not prepare me for the overwhelming, and often paralyzing, emotions that took over my whole being when I finally accepted that the dream of us could no longer be a part of my life.
Dreams of us living out the rest of our time on this earth enveloped in each others’ loving presence, where days flowed with the secured ease of souls rooted in fulfilling their ultimate purpose. Of him leading us in building empires together, filling passports exploring exotic destinations together, growing wiser together, elevating together, saying our last good-byes together.
Photo by Allison Heine on Unsplash
My dreams and expectations for our intertwined existence in this physical realm went deeper than anything I had ever hoped to achieve in this lifetime. I spent so much time imagining every detail of the simplest moments like the rush of electricity I would feel as he unconsciously traced his fingers down my shoulder as we sat talking to friends at dinner. Us brushing our teeth side by side, then me making a corny joke that completely takes him by surprise and he spews toothpaste all over the mirror in an attempt regain his composure. Or the moment I notice a subtle change in his tone when he starts speaking about something he’s passionate about and I make a mental note to remember to encourage and foster that passion.
It didn’t matter that my head knew he was inconsistent. It didn’t matter that my eyes saw the red flags that my heart ignored. It didn’t matter that my body felt like it received physical blows when he would abruptly give me the silent treatment instead of just communicating so that we could solve our issues. It didn’t matter that I shouldered the accountability he wouldn’t. It didn’t matter that he was in complete denial about how his past still haunted him and how he allowed it sabotage what he wanted and needed most. None of it mattered because despite it, I was willing to stand by his side through it all if he just allowed me to. That’s how rooted I allowed those dreams to become within me. They evoked such visceral feelings throughout my entire body that I could swear it was like he was deep inside of it constantly.
Then to suddenly have those dreams ripped out of my hands over and over again were blows I never thought I could recover from. Each time I forced myself to swallow my pride, disrespect my boundaries and disregard my needs just for fleeting glimpses of those visions before they were extinguished again. To say it hurt does a huge disservice to the depths of the pain I felt as I added yet another trauma to my To Heal From list.
“None of it mattered because despite it, I was willing to stand by his side through it all if he just allowed me to. “
Finally, after carrying a heart so heavy I feared it would dislodge from my chest for far longer than I care to admit, I started digging. The shards from my shattered soul dug into arms that felt like lead from all the digging I needed to do to bury those dreams that, at one time, made my heart swell in anticipation of their manifestation.
As I leaned over the gaping hole that held the vision I had birthed from the seed he planted in me that he didn’t have the capacity to nurture, I allowed myself to mourn openly. I didn’t hold a single tear, emotion, thought, scream or curse word back. I let it all pour out of me into that grave for as long as I felt I needed to.
Then as the weight slowly lifted from my arms, I slowly began to shovel the dirt back in. While the soil I removed was completely devoid of what I vitally needed, each pile of earth I returned was laced with what was lacking. Big heaping doses of love, confidence, security, safety, validation, acknowledgement, consistency, respect, trust, compassion, accountability, acceptance, honesty, communication, understanding, appreciation and knowing that I am worth more than what he was capable of giving in his own wounded state. Does it excuse or make the behaviors okay? Absolutely not and at the same time I can accept that there are some hard truths that he is not ready or willing to face.
And while those truths prematurely ended what I envisioned as a life-long collaboration of two souls that the Universe has shown time and time again that are permanently intertwined, they cleared the path for new dreams to be sown. Dreams, wants and desires that go beyond anything I could have conceived before.
For now, I am dreaming, desiring and setting intentions from a healing and evolving space where I can allow what I precisely want and need to flow to me with relative ease and peace. I am no longer trying to control, chase, plead, make do with or settle for things that are beneath what I have already asked the Universe for. And in kind, the Universe has answered.
I wanted a deeply connected, loving relationship and the Universe lead me to finding that within myself. I longed for happiness. The Universe showed me how it was a state of mind that I was responsible for allowing. I craved validation and knowing that I’m worthy. The Universe opened my eyes to the intrinsic value that comes from the greatest act of service you could ever perform for someone: knowing that you are worthy of love and the desires of your heart.
The loss of the time and energy I spent crafting those dreams. All of the fallen me’s that sacrificed themselves without so much as a thank you from me. The agony of the slow, torturous dismantling of lives I built for us in my head. You know what they were? Birthing pains that brought forth life into dreams that I never would have gave myself permission to dream before. The labor was exhausting, wracking my body with contractions that expelled everything that held back all that I had been asking for until the moment I finally and truly let go of needing to know why, needing to what went wrong, needing to be understood and needing to reclaim my losses. And then suddenly I was holding in my hands a bundle of new dreams that were authentically mine. The cord had been cut that tied my dreams to fulfilling other’s needs above my own.
When I realized what was always inside of me through the eyes of my healing self, I knew that all the losses and deaths that I grieved over were necessary. As I said at the beginning, there was no way around it. And for that, I apologized to, forgave and thanked all of the versions of myself.
“. . .until the moment I finally and truly let go of needing to know why, needing to what went wrong, needing to be understood and needing to reclaim my losses.”
It was then that I was able grasp the true gravity of what transpired between us as the lesson and catalyst I needed to end the cycle of avoiding doing the inner work to become this version of me. Without it I was destined to repeat trying to change the ending of a story that began with my emotionally unavailable father and continued with feeding the ego of yet another emotionally unavailable man at the cost of my own happiness. He was brought into my life in the broken state he was to bring awareness to my own brokenness.
My appreciation and even my love grew tenfold for him, the person that I once deemed as the destroyer of our dreams or more correctly, my dreams. Just because I dreamed of the two of us gracing the world with our beautiful love story didn’t mean that is what he saw for us, that he even wanted that role or that he ever had the space in his heart to accommodate the depth of love I was willing to give to him. You see, when I asked I always got answers that deflected what he was to afraid to say and redirected my focus to meaningless words. They were definitely the red flags I saw billowing in the breeze that whispered RUN but that my heart refused to hear.
“Healing never came when I clawed in search of it. Instead, it came when I was willing to listen to the lesson the pain was here to teach me.”
-Lauren Fortenberry
I say all of this to let you know that the grief you may be knee deep in right now, that feels like it will never end is normal and it will transform into other, more positive feelings like appreciation, joy and peace in its time. Some of us are mourning the death of dreams, relationships, careers and a host of other things that have been cultivated over many years and sometimes decades. Those are not easy losses that can be overcome quickly with positive affirmations. Many times the healing is going to feel worse than the original wound because let’s be honest, there are going to be setbacks and triggers that are going to bring back the grief in full force like it happened yesterday.
But if you allow yourself to feel the pain, process the grief, then turn your focus onto the lessons and trust that those losses and deaths that you are grieving are for your ultimate and highest good, you will come out on the other side in appreciation of the path you needed to take to get there.
