He Asked What My Dreams Were

A note before you read: This article is a personal reflection and general emotional support. It is not medical, legal, or mental health advice.

His name was Colin. One L — he mentioned it, the way people do when they've spent a lifetime being spelled wrong. He worked in higher education, at a university.

We were talking the way people talk on dating apps, which is to say we were skipping several steps. And somewhere in there he asked me what my hopes and dreams were. Where I saw myself in a year. In five years. In ten. What the plans were.

It was a completely normal question. A good one, even. The kind of question someone asks when they're actually interested in who you are.

I had absolutely nothing.

Not Modesty. Not Deflection.

I want to be clear about this because it's easy to misread.

I wasn't being coy. I wasn't protecting myself or keeping something back until I knew him better. I genuinely did not have an answer, and the realization arrived while I was sitting there trying to produce one.

I had not dared to dream or plan in years.

I had been living day to day. Surviving day to day. The horizon of my thinking had contracted to what needed to happen next — the appointment, the meal, the bedtime, the thing that would go wrong if I didn't manage it. Five years was not a unit of time I had access to. I could barely think in weeks.

What I Think I Said

I don't remember exactly. If I answered at all, I think I said something like: I used to like to travel.

Which was true. I had loved it. And I had not done it once in the entire marriage — not from the date of the wedding to the date of the divorce. Years of not going anywhere, and the thing that came out of my mouth was a past-tense version of a thing I used to be.

I used to like to travel. That was the best I had.

What Actually Happened to the Dreams

They didn't get taken. Nobody sat me down and told me to stop having a future.

What happened is that planning requires a certain kind of stability. You have to believe that the next year will resemble this one closely enough for a plan to survive it. You have to have enough left over — energy, money, attention — to spend some of it on something that hasn't happened yet.

When you're managing an unstable situation, all of that gets reallocated. Planning becomes a luxury item. And then, at some point, you stop noticing that you've stopped doing it, because the not-planning has become the normal condition.

You don't lose your dreams. You just stop being able to afford them, and eventually you forget the account existed.

Why the Question Was So Hard

Because I could have answered it about almost anyone else.

I knew what my children needed. I knew what everyone in my house ate, what appointments were coming, what problems were about to require handling, what kept the whole thing functioning. I had detailed, comprehensive, five-year answers about other people.

The question about me hit a place where the information should have been and wasn't.

What I Would Say Now

The answers came back. Not immediately, and not because I sat down and did an exercise about it. They came back the way preferences come back — through small use, in the ordinary act of getting to decide things again.

But I remember that conversation because it was the first time anyone had asked me the question in a form that expected a real answer. And I remember realizing that the blankness wasn't a personality problem.

I had not stopped having dreams.

I had stopped being asked about them.

August 2026 · Life After Ours