When I was a child, I used to think people abandoned their dreams only because they weren’t brave enough to chase it.

Then I grew up.

Turns out, courage has very little to do with an empty refrigerator.

There is something deeply unfair about asking someone to choose passion when survival is standing at the door asking for rent. We love telling people to follow their hearts as though hearts have never worried about tuition fees, overdue bills, sick parents, younger siblings waiting for school allowance, or cupboards that echo when you open them. We romanticize the starving artist until the starving part stops sounding poetic and starts sounding exactly like what it is.

Hunger.

 

I have heard some people tell their young ones and children that relying solely on what they love to do might not generate enough income for them to survive on or support a livelihood. Ss if it is meant to be comforting. As if practicality is a life raft and passion is only extra weight you should throw overboard. Maybe they’re right. Maybe passion doesn’t pay electric bills. Maybe dreams don’t come with health insurance. Maybe love for your craft cannot be exchanged for groceries at the cashier.

But knowing they’re right has never made it hurt less.

 

I wonder how many people are walking around carrying versions of themselves that never got the chance to exist. The painter who became an accountant because someone had to. The musician who learned spreadsheets instead of scales. The writer who stopped writing anything except emails because words stopped paying enough to survive.

 

Sometimes I catch myself wondering what my mother was passionate about before practicality learned her name. I know the answer to that. She was a writer and music composer who sacrificed her creative genius to become a homemaking wife and mother of five children. It was only a few years ago that she began to record some of her songs one at a time. She always chose what was necessary over what she loved.

 

I wonder what my father dreamed of becoming before he started measuring every opportunity against rent, tuition, and tomorrow’s meals.

I can answer this question with clarity too. My father wanted to become a lawyer, but he ended up studying political science and teaching government in secondary schools until he became a principal. He could have studied more and pushed for his dream, but he met my mother, fell in love and didn’t want to delay marrying her lest another man take her away from him because he wanted to fulfil his dreams

 

We spend so much of our lives thanking our parents for everything they gave us that we rarely stop to ask what they had to give up. Maybe before they became providers, they were simply people with dreams that sounded just as impossible as mine.

 

That’s why this hurts more than I know how to explain.

 

What hurts isn’t choosing practicality. What hurts is realising that the choice was never really yours. Because what kind of choice is it when one path lets you eat, and the other asks you to gamble with everyone depending on you? We call it following reality, but reality has always favored the people who could afford to lose, and that’s why dreaming feels different depending on where you’re standing.

 

For some, dreams are destinations. For others, they are luxuries with price tags.

 

It’s easy to tell someone to chase what sets their soul on fire when you’ve never had to wonder whether that fire can keep the lights on.

I don’t think people stop loving their passions. I think they learn to love other people more.

 

They choose stability because someone has to.

They choose certainty because uncertainty has already taken enough from them.

They choose the paycheck over the poem, the office over the orchestra they love, the promotion over the painting, because the responsibilities around them became impossible to ignore.

 

And that’s the quiet grief nobody talks about.

Not everyone who let go wanted to.

Some of them simply ran out of room to keep holding on.

 

We celebrate the people who made it, the ones who bet everything on a dream and won.

We build documentaries around them.

We call them proof that passion always finds a way, but we rarely hear from the ones who were just as talented, just as relentless, just as deserving.

The only difference was that they couldn’t afford to fail.

 

Maybe that’s why I can never judge the person who chose practicality. I don’t know what was waiting for them at home. I don’t know what bills were folded inside their wallet. I don’t know whose future they had to carry before they could even think about building their own.

 

Dreams don’t disappear because people stop believing in them; they disappear because survival asks for a sacrifice, and dreams are often the first thing laid on the altar.

 

People love saying that passion cannot feed you. Maybe they’re right, but I think what they forget to mention is that neither can regret.

 

The cruelest part has never been choosing practicality. It’s waking up years later, wondering whether the life that kept you alive was also the life that slowly taught a part of you how to die.

 

Maybe that’s why I wonder what my parents dreamed of becoming before they became somebody’s parents. Maybe that’s what my parents did. Maybe that’s what millions of people do every single day. They don’t stop dreaming. They simply hand those dreams to the people they love and hope they grow into the lives they never had the chance to live.

That’s why some dreams die of hunger — not because they weren’t worth chasing, but because someone else needed to eat first.