Bear with me here. This post might start out sounding like a depressing sob story, but the fact that I’ve had a dream crushed today (THANKS COVID) has made me think about the burden of dreams.

Today, the Broadway production of Frozen announced that they’re not going to open back up once the pandemic is over. This crushed me a little bit. (Okay, a lot a bit.) I’ve been in love with the soundtrack since the first day it came out. I learned all the lyrics in a week and belted them out as I drove to several job interviews during the summer of 2018. I religiously watched all the backstage videos of the cast. I kept trying to save up enough money to go see the show, but something always came up. I was saddened enough when the original cast left the show, but hearing that the show wasn’t continuing on Broadway completely demolished all my hopes of ever seeing it there.

The good news is the production will probably come to my city eventually. It’s not currently on the list for the North American tour, but I’m still hopeful to see it one day!

Anyway, this made me consider the weight of dreams. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened to me. When I was really little, we would occasionally drive past the Dolly Parton Dixie Stampede in Orlando. It was this huge building visible from the highway and I wasn’t even a crazy horse-lover or anything, but for some reason the idea sounded amazing! Every time we passed it I would say that one day I was going to go there.

Next thing I knew, the Dixie Stampede was gone and a car dealership stood in its place. I was crushed. The icing on the cake? The building was then torn down altogether.

You all know my love for Doctor Who. Up until a few years ago, there was this awesome thing called the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff where you could go in and, surprise, experience all things Doctor Who. They had props, interactive experiences; I mean, you could walk into the TARDIS for Pete’s sake! I would always watch videos from it and dream about going there. I knew it would be the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

Then they announced they were closing. I actually cried. For years I had dreamed of going there, and then all of a sudden my dream was made impossible. I couldn’t believe that it had been open for five years, only to close before I could get there. There have been talks about it reopening somewhere else, but nothing definite–it really hurts my heart to think of all those wonderful props just sitting in storage collecting dust!

All of this to say that dreams can be scary because they’re not guaranteed to come true. When a dream is crushed, it’s a hurt that feels like nothing else. It makes it hard to have hope.

But then there are the dreams that do come true. My lifelong dream, born in my early childhood years, was to go to England. That was it. I just wanted to go there. In the end I didn’t just go to England, but I went around the whole UK with my best friend. I went to a Downton Abbey concert at Highclere Castle. I saw all the monuments in London I had dreamed of seeing my entire life. I got to see a rainbow overlooking Loch Lomond and bike around the Outer Hebrides. I stood on Bad Wolf Bay.

In short, it was so much more than I had ever dreamed of, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything; not even for the Doctor Who Experience, the Dixie Stampede, and Frozen on Broadway all put together.

Dreams can hurt, but they are one of the things that make life worth living. Not every dream comes true, but the ones that do create some of the most memorable moments from our entire lives.

So, as Aerosmith would say: “Dream On.”