Dreams do come true
I bought a Guitar Hero set last week.
A game that was released way back in 2005.
The game that I could only play at my friend’s house after school.
The game that I could only imagine owning.
Now, 20 years later, I finally have it. My own guitar hero set. I bought it for the eleven-year-old me.
It’s funny how that works.
Dreams do come true, in different ways than we imagined.
Then, when I graduated high school in 2011, all I wanted was to study abroad.
I saw my friends pack their bags for Australia, the UK, America. I sent them to the airport, wishing that I had the chance to do it too, one day.
I’d scroll through their Instagram posts of campus lawns, coffee shops with names I couldn’t pronounce, foreigner friends they made, and the kind of freedom that comes with being far from home. New experiences I wish I’d have.
I went to a local university instead, and worked on local jobs after I graduated.
Now, in 2026, I’ve been living overseas for almost ten years. Not as a student, but as an adult with a job in a country that used to just be a daydream.
The dream came true. It just took the scenic route.
Dreams are supposed to be scary
Here’s what nobody tells you about dreams: they rarely arrive the way you sketch them out in your head. You imagine the straight line. Point A to Point B. You work hard, you get the thing, the end.
But real life doesn’t work in straight lines. It zigs when you expect it to zag. It hands you the thing you wanted, but a decade late and in a completely different context.
Sometimes it gives you something even better. Sometimes it gives you the lesson instead of the prize. Sometimes, you let go of your dreams.
And the older I get, the more I realize that’s just how life works.
I’m not saying patience is some magical virtue that solves everything. I’m not going to tell you that “everything happens for a reason” or that the universe has a plan. Those phrases feel like putting a bandaid on something that actually needs stitches.
What I’m saying is: the impossibility you feel right now isn’t permanent.
That dream that feels too big, too far, too expensive, too complicated? It might not happen next month. Or even next year. It might not happen the way you think it should.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen at all.
Maybe you’ll get there through a side door you didn’t even know existed. Maybe you’ll get there after you’ve become a completely different person. Maybe you’ll realize the dream itself has changed shape.
Maybe what you actually wanted was underneath the thing you thought you wanted.
Your dreams might take twenty years.
They might show up in unrecognizable packaging.
They might come true in ways that make you laugh at how wrong your younger self was about what would make you happy.
But they do come true.
Just not how you’d expect.
I hope you find this insightful. Remember:
It’s not going to be easy,
But it’s not impossible.
Your friend,
Brian.