How to Survive a Crushed Dream

December 15, 2023 | Lily Lawler BK ’23

image description: empty room with window facing a forest

During the winter months when the world is pulled into the deep sleep of hibernation, we look to the beginning of spring as a time for us to emerge from our rest into the light of longer days. The year is a breathing body moving between seasons of rest and productivity. But the world around us has turned it into a grinding machine that churns out work non-stop and year-round without fail. We have become trained to think about our lives like a perpetual season of spring, all fruit and flower with no room for barrenness. 

In a way, we were all forced into a season of wintering during the pandemic.

I was a first-year when the pandemic hit, full of optimism that had me believing we would return to “normal” sooner rather than later. My initial college years turned into something to survive rather than the thriving season that I had anticipated. I weathered out the zoom classes from the temperate climate of my Texas home town instead of walking up science hill in a blustery winter storm. 

But one by one, the pandemic picked away at each of my expectations for college until I was left with just one glittering hope: a dream to study abroad. 

During yet another recorded lecture, I would find myself itinerating day trips in Seoul – strategically planning the most convenient routes to hop between aesthetic cafes and art museums. My instagram and TikTok pages conspired together, furthering my daydreaming through offering videos of must see destinations for the lucky tourists that could visit Korea. As an original class of ‘23er desperate for something to redeem her not-so-bright college years, fantasies of one spectacular spring semester abroad was enough to carry me through. 

But as my sophomore year came and went, I was still no closer to a semester abroad than I had been my first year. I held my breath for half of my junior year until I was staring at the statistics that my chance of seeing the blossoms in Korea was near zero. The wind was knocked out of me.

I was crushed because I believed that spring was just around the corner, and the pandemic would soon be over. But like someone who has put a little too much trust in an alleged weather-predicting groundhog, I ended up bitterly disappointed. I expected to open the door to spring, only to have it slammed shut by another burst of winter. I found myself snowed in and asking, what am I supposed to do inside of this house? 

Despite our promises that this time is the last time we will let ourselves be devastated, we continue to place our hopes in fragile things – the dream internship, the corner office, the this time, he’s really the one. We hope for these good things because, if they are fulfilled someday, our joy would be made complete. We train ourselves to live in the bright future of our minds instead of the dark room of now. But too often, we only see the death of our hopes – not the fulfillment we expect. When our dreams are crushed, we are invited into a season of wintering. 

In her book by the same title, Katherine May describes a time of wintering as “...a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, side-lined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an out-sider.” [1] May presents an alternative to our society’s impossible expectation of a life of eternal summer: leaning into rest and learning to accept sadness rather than outrun it.

When we find ourselves thwarted by the snowdrift of disappointment, we are forced to turn back around and face the room of ourselves. What have we left untended with the expectation that we would be leaving it behind? It’s then that we find ourselves compelled to dust the table and turn on the light. Perhaps a tablecloth or flower vase could even turn this neglected room into a livable place. As May argues, seasons of emotional wintering are times to rest, recover, and reevaluate – attending to the places within ourselves that we neglect in fairer weather.

As I trekked around the frigid February air the spring of my junior year, heartbroken and hopeless, I did precisely that. Rather than latching onto a new daydream of spring to distract myself from the hurt of disappointment, I gave myself the pause to ask: why did I feel this way?

My hope was dead, and now I could see how fragile it actually was. At any sign of misery or stress during my time at Yale, I would quickly console myself with, “Yes this sucks now, but everything will be better when…” I clung onto the idea of studying abroad as a distant comfort that kept me from truly having to face the present. But I realized my desire to escape what was around me had less to do with my actual circumstances, and more to do with what was within my heart. I could finally bring myself to face a harder question: what could God teach me through this disappointment? 

Time after time I found myself crushed by another failed dream, and was now hit with the realization that I had placed my hope in something fleeting. Good things would pass, and the disappointments lingered. Like a child chasing the end of a rainbow, I was hoping for things I would never be able to touch. Chasing an evanescent dream was exhausting, but was there anything lasting worth placing my hope in?

The things of this world would all eventually pass away, like flowers that would wither at the first frost. So, I had to look for something beyond what I could see and touch. For me, that hope was found in an eternal God. What I could finally grasp on the other side of this disappointment was not just His lasting presence, but also His enduring promises and what that meant for me each day. God’s steadfastness gave me the heart to face the present with peace and joy in remembering that suffering is temporary in light of eternal rest. 

I began to find the courage to face the dark room of myself each morning and ask: What does the eternal, gracious God want to do with this space? 

And so I waited. Silence broke when a knock came at the door. And to my surprise, a friend had come to visit me in my winter room. We sat at the table and talked for hours–sharing both laughter and tears–until the candle of the day grew dim and we said farewell. The next day no one came. But the day after that held another knock and a different friend who sat with me in the once dark room. 

I had been so blinded by my desire for one thing, I never saw the value of the things that had been given to me – friends who would sit in a winter room with me. Soon, the four walls of myself were filled with tokens of memories, shared joys, and new light. I learned to cherish the precious things that God had placed in my ungrateful hands. Like a parent giving a young child a small, heart-beating creature to hold for the sake that they might learn gentleness, this season at Yale was the portion I had been given.

And I found, day after white winter day, as I learned to tend the barren room and sit patiently in it, that there would be an unexpected knock at the door, and a guest to invite in to sit at the table with me. Slowly, this space of disappointment and bitterness became a home I could share and live in.

I liked another Twitter post, sighing at the cropped image of pink blossoms against blue skies.. Korea was finally in full bloom this year. Yet, upon looking closer I realized that the Twitter handle was that of my education studies professor. Given I had seen her at 11:15am that morning, she was definitely in New Haven. I tapped on the tagged location: Wooster Square. 

Swiping open my notes app, I wrote out my schedule for the next Saturday:

9:00am – Wake Up

10:00am – Coffee from Kaiden’s

10:30 – Wooster Square Cherry Blossoms

That morning was filled with swirling pink and white petals. As I stood amidst the people laughing and taking photos,I thought of the story of Hagar: the only person in the Bible who names God. She, an enslaved mother on the brink of death in the desert, was met by God in her suffering when He spoke to her and gave her a well to drink from. Hagar called Him Jehovah El Roi: the God who sees me. [2]

My winter was far from any kind of physical suffering. I lived in abundance, with a Yale dorm room’s fluorescent ceiling light over my head at night and a daily pick of dining halls to eat from. And yet, my heart suffered under the weight of a crushed dream. 

But in this heartache, I was given this moment to stand under the pink and white blossoms that rained down with each sway of a branch. I was not in Korea, but these were the same blossoms that I had yearned for with each passing year. In that moment, I realized that the shrapnel of my broken dream that had been embedded in me rose to the surface of my heart – and God saw all of it. He saw all of the excitement and hope I once held, with all of the sorrow and grief at the passing of this dream. Jehovah El Roi. The God who sees me. Not only does He see us, but He wants us to see Him. Under those blossoms, I echoed the same words that Hagar said thousands of years ago, “I have now seen the One who sees me.” 

“It all works out in the end,” are words we offer as relief to others in their fallow seasons, but in times when winter seems like it will never end, these words are an empty comfort. But for those who love Him and seek Him, God gives us this promise: although our lives may never be our own idea of good, that He will turn it into something good beyond what we could fathom on our own. These were not the blossoms I had imagined, but they were beautiful, surrounded by the hope I had found in realizing God’s affection for me.

God took away the fragile hope I had, knowing that it was turning my face away from the eternal hope that He was promising me in Himself, and His words.

I still hope for beautiful things. I look forward to the day I graduate, the promise of the next season of life, and of the exciting things I may one day get to do. I hope that all of these things come to pass. But these hopes are no longer my heart’s lifeline.

These days I leave my room often. The weather is bright, the day is long, and I visit my friends in their own winter rooms to weather the day with them. 

But when I feel the first sting of winter at my cheeks, telling me that the death of something is drawing near, I strive to remember Who my hope is in. And so then, I tend my table, take the time to stoke the fire, and wait patiently for hope to knock on my door.

Sources Used:

[1] Katherine May. Wintering. Pg 10.

[2] Genesis 16:7-13