We have the right to change our dreams
Three years ago, right in the middle of August, I quietly fell apart. Officially, I was on holiday, but I’d wake up in the morning with a lump in my throat, my mind preoccupied with worries, unfinished projects and urgent matters I’d pretended to forget. Nothing was really going wrong, yet everything felt like a burden.
It’s exhausting to be strong. That summer, sitting alone on a deckchair in the shade of the fisherman’s cottage we’d rented, I couldn’t bring myself to open the novel I’d hoped to lose myself in to take my mind off things. I couldn’t close my eyes, despite the blazing sun beating down with its fiercest rays. And I couldn’t manage to speak gently either – neither to my loved ones nor to myself. I was standing tall, yet at the same time I’d fallen from my horse.
August is a strange month. Officially set aside for rest, it holds the opposite effect of that promise: a sort of dizziness when calm sets in. A face-to-face encounter with oneself. Our bodies slow down, but our minds keep racing. During this enforced pause, everything we’ve kept at bay can suddenly emerge, like a wild beast from behind the undergrowth. August is a month when the compass goes haywire, so we get lost in it just as in the maze in *Alice in Wonderland*: we’re too big for the small doors, too small for the large ones.
It took me months to realise that my outlook on the world, on my life, had changed. My dreams had taken on a different texture. I thought I’d been drained of my energy, but no. Not at all. My energy, full and devoted, remained in the starting blocks, directionless. The energy we think we’ve lost is like a great wave ready to set off again but unsure of where to go. It took me a while to distinguish between failure and transformation. A stumble and a change of course. Desire isn’t dead; it floats, simply waiting for the next shore.
A dream we thought was certain, only to see it transform – it throws our whole inner world into disarray. Resetting one’s mindset is exhausting, yes. A kind of fatigue you can’t shake off by sleeping two extra nights – no. Time begins to drift, despite the demands that never let up. Perhaps the cruellest thing is that we continue to be praised for our strength because that is what is expected of us. The ground gives way when there is nowhere left to fall. Women are forces of nature; that is well known. They are also like birds: they hide away to die. It is a collapse without a collapse.
So I (really) asked myself: do we have the right to change our dreams? Yes, of course. But it’s a right we sometimes have to reclaim. The world looks at us through the eyes of our past selves. Do I have the right to be different from who I used to be? Do I have the right to no longer desire what took me so many years to build? Do I have the right to stop dreaming of what has always inspired me?
Yes, once again. But that ‘yes’ doesn’t come easily. It requires us to face a kind of mourning, to demystify the past without denying it. It demands that we free ourselves from the gaze of others and from our own self-perception. It’s like renovating a house: we transform what we know to be unchangeable because we have no intention of leaving.
We stay, but in a different way.
When a dream dies, it is sometimes because it isn’t really ours. We then feel wistful about a dream, but whose dream is it? A parent’s? A loved one’s? A world that values certain paths at the expense of others? The pressure to dream, so characteristic of our times, forces us to ‘think big’, to nurture a vision. We are no longer carried along by our dreams – no, that’s too naïve. We turn them into measurable strategies. Dreaming in this way is not only a trap leading to exhaustion but also a societal imperative. I have dreams. Oh really, don’t you?
Changing one’s dreams, dreaming more slowly, more discreetly, is also a matter of adapting. Recognising that we evolve because desire, like a plant, is a living organism. It changes, it withers, it is reborn, it blooms. Some summers, not at all. And this is no betrayal.
In this uncomfortable yet sacred in-between space, it is the moment when the old is no longer enough and the new has not yet been named. A state of transformation where one may feel empty, on the margins and illegitimate. Yet it is here that something radically alive is taking place. Letting go is not a lack of action. On the contrary, it is an active act: it opens up the space of possibility.
bell hooks writes that “we cannot love what we do not have the courage to know.” This is equally true of our own transformations. For bell hooks, acknowledging one’s inner transformations is an act of self-love. It involves disidentifying with the image that others project onto us in order to allow a freer self to emerge. bell hooks emphasises that real and fruitful love requires genuine self-knowledge. This principle also applies to our dreams: to love them is also to have the courage to reconsider them and let them go if they no longer honour us. It takes a tender and informed view of oneself to recognise that yesterday’s dream may have been a good one, but it will never again be today’s.
Virginia Woolf, for her part, writes in ⟪A Room of One’s Own⟪: “Every time I sit down to write, an angel enters the room and tells me that I am nothing.” What she is expressing here is the difficulty of reinventing oneself in a world that celebrates unbroken continuity and women who know how to efface themselves to the point of self-forgetfulness. She also writes in The Waves, that true beauty breaks the heart, in that it compels us to greater lucidity. Whilst beauty awakens a deep joy, it first takes us through the vertigo of the unknown and a break with the familiar. It cracks the defences we have put in place, bringing buried emotions to the surface.
I think our dreams work in this way. Perhaps they even need, at some point, to shatter a little to reveal something else. A truer form of joy. For at the end of the journey lies a new lightness. When we allow ourselves to change our dreams, an unexpected ecstasy washes over us. A solid joy, springing from the earth, which promises to embrace a movement that reflects who we are. The joy of living exists only in a story we have chosen. Never in the one we strive to maintain.
Changing one’s dream does not, therefore, mean starting all over again. It means carrying on in a different way, with greater precision, tenderness and, above all, greater freedom. It is this freedom that I cherish today, and the one I wanted to talk to you about.
Long live the dreams that are no longer ours, and the new ones that will come at just the right time.
Warm regards,
Inès Leonarduzzi.
Inès Leonarduzzi is a socio-environmentalist. A few years ago, she founded an NGO that advocates for and promotes digital technology that consumes less energy and is kinder to our brains. She is the author of the essay *Réparer le futur* (Published by Observatoire, 2021) and gives talks in France and abroad on a variety of topics, ranging from the environment to culture, including our new ways of living (together). She occasionally writes poetry. Every month throughout 2025, she invites readers to come together on Aroma-Zone.com to explore the theme of joy, so that we may collectively discover the possibilities for a daily life which, despite its ups and downs, is worth living.
