The Dreams You're Living Aren't Yours
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
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Grace was dying.
After 67 years of marriage, three children, and a life that looked perfect from the outside, she lay in the hospital bed with tears streaming down her face.
“I wanted to travel the world,” she whispered to her palliative care nurse. “I wanted to write stories. I wanted to live alone in a small apartment in Paris and eat croissants every morning.”
She paused, struggling to breathe.
“But everyone expected me to be the perfect wife. The perfect mother. I lived the life they wanted me to live, not the one I dreamed about.”
Grace died three days later.
Her nurse, Bronnie Ware, would later write that this was the most common deathbed regret she heard: “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
But here’s what Ware didn’t realize—and what you need to understand: Grace’s story isn’t just about lacking courage.
It’s about something far more disturbing.
Grace never had her own dreams to begin with.
