The Canvas Left Untouched: The Price of Suppressed Dreams

There is a peculiar kind of grief that doesn’t announce itself with sobs or eulogies. It lingers quietly, settling in the spaces between routine and responsibility. It’s the ache of an artist who has abandoned their craft, not by choice, but by necessity. It’s the silent mourning of a violinist whose fingers still trace invisible melodies in the air, of a painter whose hands are now more familiar with keyboards than canvases, of a writer who no longer strings together poetry but only emails and reports. It is the grief of someone who once lived through the rhythm of creation, but now exists in the monotony of survival.

They tell you it’s for the best. They say passion is a luxury, not a livelihood. And so, you trade in your dreams for something more practical. The sketchbooks that once held your soul gather dust in the corner of a room you no longer sit in. The stage where you once lost yourself in characters and stories fades into a distant memory as you slip into a suit and practice your firm handshake. You do what’s expected, what’s sensible. Because passion, they say, doesn’t pay the bills.

At first, you tell yourself you can do both. That you will find time for your art after work, on the weekends, in the quiet moments between obligations. But the exhaustion sets in. The corporate world is not built for dreamers. Deadlines loom, bills pile up, and soon, you stop reaching for the paintbrush, the guitar, the pen. You start saying, "Maybe next weekend," until the weekends blend into years. Until one day, you realize you haven't created anything in so long that the thought of trying again feels foreign, almost futile.

Somewhere along the way, art became an indulgence, not a necessity. Schools, parents, and society at large have bought into the idea that the arts are secondary—beautiful but nonessential, enriching but impractical. STEAM became STEM, and creativity became a footnote in the grand narrative of success. Children who once dreamed of composing symphonies, writing novels, or painting murals are gently nudged, sometimes shoved, toward engineering, medicine, finance, and technology. The argument is always the same: “We just want the best for you”

And the thing is, they’re not wrong. The world is unforgiving. Tuition debt is high, rents are astronomical (and due!), groceries are expensive, healthcare is a privilege, the job market is unpredictable, and the idea of making a living off of something you love seems impossible. The parents who once dreamed themselves are the same parents who learned, through hardship, that society does not value the arts the way it does science and technology. Their warnings are born out of love, out of fear. But love doesn’t erase the cost of their words. The cost is a generation of artists who buried their own voices under GPAs and career plans. A generation that wakes up every morning feeling like something is missing, but unable to name what it is.

For high school seniors choosing their college majors, the weight of this decision is crushing. Art schools are getting harder to get into, with skyrocketing tuition and dwindling funding for the arts. Acceptance rates are brutal, scholarships even more so. And the voice of doubt—whether from parents, teachers, or deep within themselves—begins to whisper: "Is it worth it?"

They sit in front of college applications, hands hovering over dropdown menus of pre-approved futures. Business. Engineering. Medicine. Safe, respectable careers. Careers that come with stability, with certainty. But their hearts hesitate, lingering over the box labeled "Fine Arts," "Creative Writing," "Music Composition." They wonder if choosing what they love means choosing struggle, if passion is a currency that will never pay for rent, if following their dreams is an act of foolishness rather than bravery.

And so many of them choose safety. They convince themselves that they can make art on the side, that they will find time after work, that their creative selves will survive the slow erosion of practicality. But the world is relentless. The days are filled with obligations, with deadlines, with responsibilities that demand all their energy. They put their brushes down, their instruments away, their notebooks on a shelf—and, unknowingly, they begin the slow process of mourning something they have not even lost yet.

My boyfriend’s brother, Jerry, was one of them. His absolute passion was bass guitar, and he lived for it. I remember the first time I watched him play—completely lost in the music, his fingers moving effortlessly over the strings, his whole body swaying with the rhythm. It wasn’t just skill. It was something deeper, something raw. He would play for hours, sometimes skipping meals, sometimes staying up until sunrise, letting the music pull something out of him that words never could. It wasn’t just a hobby. It was who he was.

Jerry didn’t just want to play—he wanted to teach. He wanted to share his love for music, to help kids feel the way he felt when he played. He used to give lessons to his little brother, patiently explaining techniques, demonstrating different styles, and talking about why music mattered. His little brother idolized him, hanging onto every word, every note. But then, one day, Jerry just stopped. When his brother asked for a lesson, Jerry simply said he was too tired, too busy. And he never taught him again.

He was supposed to go to college for instrumental music. He had plans, ambitions, dreams that stretched beyond the small town he lived in. He was going to make something of himself—not in the way adults meant when they talked about "practical careers," but in a way that mattered. He wanted to feel something real, to give people something to feel through his music. But then COVID happened. The world shut down, and suddenly, dreams weren’t a priority. His music school closed its doors before he could even step inside. The scholarships, the auditions, the gigs—all gone in an instant. And reality hit like a brick wall.

He needed to work. So he became a motorcycle mechanic. The job was stable, the pay was decent, and it made sense. But every time I see him now, I see the weight of that choice in his eyes. He comes home with grease-stained hands and an exhausted slouch, and sometimes he sits in silence, staring at one of his four basses like it’s something distant, something he once knew but can’t quite reach anymore. He still plays, but it’s different now. It’s not for hours. It’s not with that same unshakable passion. It’s quieter, almost hesitant, like he’s afraid to let himself get lost in it again only to be pulled back into reality.

And yet, some part of me refuses to accept that this is how it has to be. If the world is so harsh, so cold to artists, why do we love art so much? Why do we turn to music when we’re sad, to books when we’re lonely, to movies when we need to escape? How can we consume something so voraciously while dismissing the people who create it? It is a contradiction I cannot reconcile.

I think about my aunt, who once spent entire afternoons painting landscapes in her backyard, her hands always stained with oil paints, the scent of turpentine lingering in the air. She had a gallery lined up. A chance to sell her work, to make a name for herself. But her father and husband told her art was not a job, and she believed them. So she put down her brushes and got a job at a bank.

Then, at 62, she sat in her home office, staring at spreadsheets. The easel in the corner is covered in dust. When I asked her why she stopped painting, she shrugged. "I just got busy." But her voice cracked on the last word.

When she died last year, I remember seeing one of her paintings still hanging in her living room, the soft hues of a sunset frozen in time. My relatives wept around me, their grief thick in the air. I barely knew the woman—I had only ever really known her through the stories my mother and aunt told me about their childhood, about the way she used to sketch their faces on napkins at restaurants, how she would paint the sky just as the sun was setting, chasing the fading colors with her brush. And yet, I sat there and cried, my hand in my cousin’s, feeling the weight of something I couldn’t quite name. Even now, months later, those paintings remain untouched. Her husband, too ashamed and struck with grief, cannot bring himself to move them. As if taking them down would mean admitting she was really gone.

Or, take my cousin Dominic, who could sketch entire worlds with just a pencil and a scrap of paper. As a kid, he’d sit for hours at the dining table, lost in his drawings—fantastical cities, creatures with too many eyes, heroes with capes that flowed like waterfalls. He dreamed of being an animator, of bringing his creations to life. But his mother told him there was no future in cartoons. "Art is a hobby," he said. "Not a career."

So Dominic became an architect. It was close enough, he told himself. He still got to draw, still got to create. But now, instead of the wild, boundless ideas that once filled his sketchbooks, he drafts blueprints for shopping malls and office buildings. I visited him once at work, watched him move his pencil mechanically over the paper, tracing lines that had no soul. Later that night, I saw him sitting at his desk at home, flipping through one of his old sketchbooks. His fingers hovered over the pages, as if tracing memories of who he used to be. And then, with a sigh, he closed it and tucked it back into the drawer.

And then there was Jaiden. He had been dancing since he was five years old—ballet, contemporary, even hip-hop when he wanted to feel something looser, something free. He lived for the stage, for the rush of performing, for the way music could move through him and make him weightless. At sixteen, he was accepted into an elite dance conservatory. It was supposed to be the beginning of everything.

But then, in his last year of high school, he tore his ACL during a routine rehearsal. One wrong landing. One second of imbalance. And just like that, his future unraveled. He tried to push through physical therapy, tried to convince himself he could still make it, but the pain never fully left. The doctors told him he might never dance the same way again.

He stopped dancing altogether. He went to college for marketing. A safe choice. A smart choice. Now, He is en route to work in an office, analyzing sales reports and drafting advertising campaigns. Sometimes, though, when he thinks no one is watching, he still dances—barefoot in his apartment, in the dim glow of the kitchen light, his movements smaller, restrained, but still aching with something raw and unspoken. And I wonder if, deep down, he still hears the music calling him back.

I look at the children still scribbling stories in notebooks, still making music in garages, still filling sketchbooks with colors that don’t yet make sense, and I want to tell them: Do not let this world harden you. Do not let them convince you that what you love is a waste of time. Because the world will always need people who remind us what it means to be human. And maybe, just maybe, if enough of us refuse to let our passions die, we can build a future where choosing art isn’t an act of defiance—but simply, an act of being who we are meant to be.

But I know the reality. I know that many of them will grow up and be told, again and again, that passion is a hobby, not a path. That their art is charming but impractical. That they should be more realistic. And I know how that kind of thinking eats away at you, slowly, like rust spreading over something that was once brilliant and unbreakable.

The price of suppressed dreams is not always immediate. It is subtle, creeping in through exhaustion, through that unshakable feeling that something is missing. It appears in the way people look out of office windows with vacant eyes, in the way they turn on the radio and feel a strange, unspoken ache when a song reminds them of the person they used to be. It is the weight in their chest when they see a film so breathtaking it reminds them of the scripts they never wrote, the novels they never finished, the dances they never performed. It is waking up in the morning and feeling a hollowness you can’t quite name, a longing that is too distant to reach but too present to ignore.

I wonder what it does to a person to have something that felt like their entire purpose taken away from them. Psychologists talk about "self-actualization"—the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It’s the fulfillment of one’s potential, the pursuit of meaning, the act of fully becoming oneself. But when creative people are forced to suppress their passions for the sake of stability, they’re denied self-actualization. They live in a constant state of cognitive dissonance, torn between what they love and what they must do to survive. Over time, this can lead to chronic dissatisfaction, burnout, even depression. And when dreams are buried for too long, they do not simply disappear—they decay, leaving behind something heavy, something bitter, something that lingers in the bones like regret.

This is not just a personal tragedy; it is a cultural one. The world needs art. It always has. Music, literature, painting, theater—these are the things that shape culture, preserve history, and capture what it means to be human. And yet, we have convinced ourselves that they are frivolous pursuits, hobbies at best. But what would life be without them? Imagine a world without books, without films, without music that stirs the soul. Imagine a world where every wall is blank, every voice silenced, every song forgotten. We need engineers to build bridges, but we also need storytellers to remind us why we cross them. We need doctors to heal bodies, but we need artists to heal souls.

And the world does not mourn these losses. There is no funeral for the poet who became an accountant, no eulogy for the artist who trades their easel for a desk job. No one stands up and says, "We have lost something beautiful today." Because these losses do not happen all at once. They happen in small moments, in choices made under the weight of rent and expectations. And so, people carry these quiet griefs alone, pretending they are fine because, after all, they are doing what they are supposed to do. They are responsible. They are successful. They have what they need. And yet, something inside them remains unfinished, like a sentence cut off before its final word.

Why is financial security seen as something that can only be obtained by abandoning passion? Why does survival have to come at the cost of self-fulfillment? Why do we treat dreams as luxuries, rather than as essential pieces of what makes life worth living?

Success does not have to mean suffering. It does not have to mean following a path someone else laid out for you, a path that drains you, a path that silences you. It means creating your own way, carving out a space where passion and practicality can coexist. It means challenging the idea that art is a luxury, that teaching is a thankless job, that doing what you love is an impossible dream. Because it’s not. It never was. We were just told to believe it was.

And yet, the burden remains. People convince themselves that their sacrifices were necessary, that they had no choice. But deep down, when the world quiets, when they are alone with their thoughts, the question lingers: What if? What if I had tried? What if I had fought a little harder? What if I had chosen differently? And the thing about regret is that it does not fade—it festers. It becomes something you carry with you, something you see in the faces of those who still dare to dream.

This quiet grief has found an unexpected voice in the form of a viral TikTok trend. Across the platform, people are posting videos set to either ABBA’s "The Winner Takes It All" or Chappell Roan’s "Good Luck, Babe." The chosen lyrics aren’t arbitrary—they encapsulate the bittersweet resignation of those who once chased dreams but ultimately had to let them go.

Under the melancholic strains of ABBA’s "The winner takes it all / The loser has to fall / It's simple and it's plain / Why should I complain?," users share montages of their younger selves—dancing, painting, acting—juxtaposed with their present-day reality: spreadsheets, hospital shifts, endless meetings. The contrast is jarring, a visual representation of a choice they never truly wanted to make.

Others opt for Chappell Roan’s haunting refrain: "When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night / With your head in your hands, you're nothing more than his wife / And when you think about me all of those years ago / You're standing face to face with 'I told you so.’" Chappell Roan’s lyrics paint a devastating picture of regret and self-denial. The woman in the song wakes up beside a man who sees her only as his wife, realizing too late that she has sacrificed a part of herself to maintain the illusion of a conventional life. In the past, she was given a choice—to embrace the love she truly wanted or to conform to expectations. She chose the latter, believing she could suppress her real identity. But Roan’s words serve as a bitter reminder: the truth cannot be outrun. No matter how much she tries to convince herself otherwise, she will always feel the weight of what she lost—the love, the freedom, and the authenticity she abandoned. Beyond this narrative, TikTok creators have reimagined the lyrics as a metaphor for their relationship with their past selves—the child who dreamed, the teenager who believed, the young adult who tried, only to be met with the harsh reality that passion alone doesn’t pay the bills.

Comment sections are flooded with shared sorrow. "I thought I was the only one who felt this way," one user writes. Another confesses, "I still dream about acting. I wake up feeling like I left something behind in another life." Some videos end on hopeful notes—creators rediscovering their art in small, quiet ways. A nurse playing violin in her living room after a 12-hour shift. A corporate lawyer sketching on her lunch break. A former theater kid performing monologues in their bedroom, just for themselves.

Maybe it seems too late for some of us. Maybe the weight of responsibilities, [future] mortgages, and obligations keeps us from returning to the art we once loved. Maybe we will always feel the ghost of what could have been. But maybe it’s not too late to fight for a world where the next generation doesn’t have to choose between their dreams and their future. Maybe it’s not too late to tell them: You don’t have to give this up. Your art matters. Your voice matters. And the world is waiting to hear it.

Because at the end of the day, when the work is done and the bills are paid, all that is left is the life you have lived. And the question that will haunt you is not "Was I successful?" but "Did I ever truly live?"