We are taught to chase our dreams.
To believe in them.
Not to give up.
To distrust anyone who tells us we cannot make it.
Chase your dreams.
It sounds good.
The problem is that almost no one asks us where those dreams came from.
Who put them inside us.
And above all, whether at some point they are still ours.
Because some dreams are born from desire.
Others from fear.
Others from a sentence.
A sentence spoken in seconds and perhaps forgotten by the person who said it.
But not by the person who heard it.
The words that stay
Parents say things to their children.
It is inevitable.
Sometimes beautiful things.
Sometimes terrible ones.
More often, simply human ones.
A tired mother.
An angry father.
A worry badly translated into a reprimand.
Look at your brother.
You could do more.
You are lazy.
You will never amount to anything.
You are worth nothing.
You do not need to imagine bad parents.
That is exactly the point.
You can love a child enormously and still hurt them without realising it.
You can want the best for them and choose the worst words to say it.
Intention and effect are not always the same thing.
An adult can say something during an argument and forget it that same evening.
A child does not yet have the tools to think:
My mother is worried.
My father is frustrated.
They are also speaking from their own fears.
The child hears only:
This is what they think of me.
And sometimes the child does not believe it at all.
They rebel.
Oh really?
I’ll show you.
That is where a wound can disguise itself as ambition.
Even compliments can become cages
You do not necessarily need cruel words.
Sometimes a role is enough.
You are the smart one.
You are the strong one.
You never give me any trouble.
I expect great things from you.
They sound like compliments.
And often they are.
But the smart child can learn to fear failure.
The strong one can become convinced they have no right to collapse.
The child who never causes trouble can become an adult who cannot ask for help.
The one destined for great things can spend half a lifetime terrified by the idea of living an ordinary life.
We spend years trying to free ourselves from the negative definitions we received.
Far less time asking how trapped we may be by the positive ones.
In both cases, someone told us who we were supposed to be.
And for a while, at least, we tried to become it.
See?
I had something to prove too.
For a long time, I do not think I even thought about it in those terms.
I did not wake up in the morning saying:
Today I will prove how much I am worth.
Life does not work like that.
The things that shape us most deeply eventually stop feeling like thoughts.
They become character.
Hunger.
Ambition.
Stubbornness.
A need for independence.
In my case, at some point, all of that became something concrete.
My own business.
I had imagined it.
Built it.
Opened it.
It was mine.
My mother was proud of it.
One hundred and thirty per cent.
I did not say:
See?
But I thought it.
And today I wonder how many things were inside those two words.
Not just the work.
Not just the result.
Perhaps there was also the boy who, many years earlier, had heard words that stayed under the skin.
See?
I did it.
I was not worth nothing.
The problem with proving people wrong
We imagine vindication as a precise moment.
A door opens.
The music starts.
Finally everyone understands.
End of film.
That did not happen to me.
I did not feel as if I had arrived.
If anything, that achievement could simply be a new beginning.
And perhaps that is the problem with the things we do to prove something.
The finish line moves.
You proved you could do one thing?
Good.
Now do another.
Then another.
Because if our worth depends on the proof we can produce, that proof expires very quickly.
And we have to start again.
Perhaps not all our dreams are born from desire.
Some are born from the need to repair something.
Do I want success because I love what I do?
Or because someone finally needs to acknowledge that I am worth something?
Do I want independence because I desire freedom?
Or because depending on someone would make me feel small again?
Do I want to be admired?
Or do I want to be seen?
The answer can also be:
both.
The fact that a wound helped drive us does not make what we built false.
The work was real.
The satisfaction was real.
So was my pride.
Then I decided to sell it
And this is where the story becomes more complicated.
Because we are very good at celebrating people who achieve a dream.
Much less so when they decide to leave it.
When I decided to sell my business, my mother became angry.
And I can understand why.
She saw the money invested.
The sacrifices.
The time.
Everything it had taken to build it.
She saw her son, who had finally created something, deciding to let it go.
She saw all of that as a mother.
I saw myself.
I saw what continuing was costing me.
She told me I had been weak.
Irresponsible.
I do not think she understood my emotional state.
And perhaps she could not.
From the outside, leaving often looks like surrender.
From the inside, sometimes it is exactly the opposite.
When it was no longer mine, the first thing I felt was freedom.
Then came guilt.
It was something I had created.
I had imagined it.
Built it.
Made it grow.
I had put money, time, energy and part of myself into it.
Even now, when I look at the photographs, I feel a little sad.
And at the same time I think:
I did that.
I am proud of it.
I can miss something without wanting it back.
I can be proud of what I built without being obliged to keep it forever.
Not everything that ends has failed.
When a dream becomes a prison
There is another possibility we talk about even less.
Sometimes dreams come true and become prisons.
Not because they were the wrong dreams.
But because once they come true, we begin to feel obliged to protect them.
We invested too much.
Sacrificed too much.
Told everyone how badly we wanted them.
Perhaps we built part of our identity around them.
And then leaving becomes incredibly difficult.
We are no longer the ones who own what we built.
What we built begins to own us.
The hardest thing to leave is not always what we failed at.
Sometimes it is precisely what we managed to achieve.
You spend years looking for the key to get in.
Then one day you realise the same key can also let you out.
But a prison built out of your own dreams does not look like a prison at all.
It can look like success.
A beautiful house.
A career.
A thriving business.
A relationship everyone thinks is perfect.
Everything you once wanted.
And that is exactly why it becomes so hard to say:
I do not want this anymore.
It does not necessarily mean we were wrong then.
It can simply mean we are right now.
The dream sends the bill
Fame is perhaps the clearest example.
We desire it because it looks like the ultimate form of freedom.
To be recognised.
To be wanted.
To earn enough never to have to ask anyone’s permission again.
Then, sometimes, it happens.
And the dream starts sending the bill.
Because success does not only give you a better life.
It gives you a life you have to maintain.
Contracts.
Homes.
Habits.
People who depend on you.
An audience that wants you to keep giving them what they loved you for.
And above all, a character.
The one that worked.
The one the public recognises.
The one that pays.
Success gave you the freedom to get there.
But it may not give you the freedom to become someone else.
Privilege is still privilege.
Denying that would be absurd.
Money solves many real problems.
Fame can open extraordinary doors.
But that does not make the price of maintaining that life imaginary.
The more expensive a life becomes, the more expensive it can become to stop being the person who finances it.
And sometimes we no longer continue because we want that life.
We continue because by then that life needs us.
First you run because you do not have enough
The mechanism does not apply only to famous people.
It is far more common than that.
First you run because you do not have enough.
Then you get something.
And suddenly you have something to lose.
So you run to maintain it.
A career.
A salary.
A home.
Status.
A certain idea of yourself.
And if you come from nothing, or from a life where security was never guaranteed, the mechanism can become even more brutal.
Because success does not only give you money.
It gives you distance.
Distance from precarity.
From dependence.
From the fear of not making it.
Sometimes even from the person you used to be.
And the greater that distance becomes, the more terrifying the idea of travelling it in reverse can feel.
First you earn in order to change your life.
Then you have to earn in order to maintain the life you changed.
We spend part of our lives trying to obtain enough to feel free.
And risk spending the next part not feeling free to lose what we obtained.
When the exception becomes the measure
Then there is the screen.
We have never had so many very young, apparently wealthy people in front of our eyes.
Rappers.
Footballers.
Influencers.
Creators.
Some really have built enormous fortunes in a very short time.
And there is nothing wrong with their success.
The problem begins when the exception becomes our measure.
You are twenty.
In front of you is someone your own age with a car that costs as much as a house, millions of followers and a life that already looks complete.
The thought can become very simple:
He is my age.
He made it.
Why haven’t I?
And suddenly studying for years looks slow.
Learning a trade looks slow.
Building something looks slow.
Saving looks painfully slow.
The comparison no longer happens only with the people around us.
It happens with the most spectacular exception an algorithm can put in front of us.
And in that space, the promise of the shortcut thrives.
Easy money.
Instant success.
People promising to teach you how to get rich quickly.
Schemes.
Betting.
Scams.
And, in the most extreme cases, the attraction of illegal paths.
Not because wanting money makes someone a criminal.
But because when we turn the speed of success into a measure of our worth, waiting begins to look like losing.
The algorithm does not tell you:
You are worth nothing.
It does something more refined.
It keeps showing you someone who appears to be worth more.
What now?
Someone could reasonably ask:
Fine. You chose yourself. But what now? How will you move forward?
It is a serious question.
Because choosing yourself does not automatically pay the bills.
Freedom does not arrive with a five-year plan attached.
Sometimes we quit too soon.
Sometimes we stay ten years too long.
There is no formula.
When I sold my business, I did not know exactly what would happen next.
I knew only one thing:
what I had built could no longer be the answer.
And perhaps one of the hardest things to accept as adults is this:
we do not always need to know the next chapter before we have the right to close the previous one.
Then life moved on.
Some things, perhaps, I will tell one day.
Others will remain mine.
But what happened afterwards is not what made that decision right or wrong.
My business had not failed.
It had simply stopped being my place.
It had been a chapter of my life.
Not my whole life.
Who is chasing whom?
And so I return to the sentence we started with.
Chase your dreams.
Fine.
But every now and then, stop.
Turn around.
Check.
Because perhaps you are still running towards something you deeply want.
If so, keep going.
But something else may have happened.
Perhaps you are running because you are afraid to stop.
Perhaps you are still proving something to your mother.
To your father.
To someone who made you feel inadequate.
Perhaps that person has even forgotten what they said.
And you are still there, years later, answering them.
Or perhaps you already reached the dream.
You just do not know how to tell it that you want to leave.
Perhaps the question is no longer:
What is my dream?
But:
Is this dream still mine?
And perhaps growing up does not only mean becoming brave enough to chase what we want.
Sometimes it means becoming free enough to stop.
I did that thing.
It existed.
It was mine.
When I look at the photographs, even now, I think:
I did that.
It was a chapter of my life.
There will be others.
Because some dreams are meant to be chased.
Others are meant to be achieved.
Others still are meant to be thanked for what they gave us and then let go.
And then there are some that keep running after us.
Perhaps not because we are supposed to reach them.
Perhaps because they are waiting for us to stop, turn around and finally ask:
Who gave birth to you?