Waking From the Dream: Grieving Who We Hoped They Would Become

I woke with a song already playing in my mind.

Not through a radio or phone; it was simply there, emerging from somewhere between dreaming and consciousness: but that was just a dream.

The words belong to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” a song I had heard countless times throughout my life without choosing to study closely.

Yet on this particular morning, that one line arrived with unusual weight.

I had been dreaming about my family.

In the dream, I was back inside the same familiar dynamics I had fled: people acting entitled to my space, disregarding my boundaries, becoming explosive when I resisted, and blaming me for the dysfunction surrounding me.

Serious harm was treated as something that could be covered with performative gifts, gestures, or temporary pleasantness—as though a superficial offering could purchase forgiveness without an apology, accountability, repair, or change.

It felt real while I was inside it.

Then I woke; for a few disoriented moments, my body still seemed caught in the old reality.

The people, conflict, and violations were gone, but the emotional residue remained.

Then the lyric returned: but that was just a dream.

There was comfort in those words.

The nightmare was no longer physically happening around me; I had fled that abusive environment.

I had established distance from people who repeatedly demonstrated that family titles mattered more to them than my safety, autonomy, or humanity.

Whatever my sleeping mind had reconstructed, I was not waking beneath that roof.

I had gotten out, but as I lay there, the line began to mean something else.

The nightmare had been a dream—but perhaps another dream had shaped even more of my life.

For years, I held tightly to the hope that the people hurting me would eventually change.

I saw who they could become if they chose honesty, empathy, accountability, or help.

I noticed moments when they behaved kindly, glimpses of warmth, qualities that suggested something better might still be possible.

I thought that if I remained patient, loving, useful, forgiving, and understanding, those glimpses might become their normal way of relating to me.

If I found the right words, perhaps they would finally understand.

If I explained my pain more clearly, perhaps they would care.

If I asked for less, gave more, remained calmer, anticipated their needs, and avoided every possible mistake, perhaps I could prevent the next explosion.

If I stayed a little longer and tried a little harder, perhaps their potential would finally become their practice.

I spent much of my life holding my breath for that transformation.

It was not unreasonable to recognize that change was possible.

Human beings are capable of learning, healing, apologizing, and becoming safer.

But possibility does not guarantee action; potential is not a promise.

No matter how clearly we see who someone could become, we cannot choose growth on their behalf.

At some point, I had to face the difference between loving someone and building a relationship with an imagined future version of them.

My love was real.

My hope was real.

My willingness to repair what I had not broken was painfully real.

But the person I kept waiting for existed more consistently in my hope than in their choices.

That realization carries a particular kind of grief; it is not merely grieving the relationship that existed.

It is grieving the relationship that almost seemed possible—the apology that might have come, the protection that should have been offered, the home that could have felt safe, and the love that might have become real if everyone had been willing to participate in it.

Perhaps that is why the lyric followed me out of sleep.

It was reminding me of two realities at once:

The nightmare I escaped is no longer the room in which I wake.
And the dream that I could become perfect enough to make other people change was never mine to fulfill.

A Relationship That Existed More Fully Inside Me

“Losing My Religion” is sometimes mistaken for a song about religious faith, but Michael Stipe has described it as a song about unrequited love, desire, and obsession.

The narrator is drawn to someone but does not know whether the feeling is shared; he watches, imagines, analyzes, reaches forward, and pulls back.

An entire relationship takes shape inside his mind while the reality between the two people remains uncertain.

Although my experience was not romantic, I recognize that painful distance between an internal relationship and an external one.

I knew the people in my family were real.

The experiences we shared were real.

My love for them was real.

But much of the relationship I kept trying to preserve existed within my longing for what family was supposed to mean.

I hoped a parent would eventually become protective.

I hoped relatives would listen long enough to understand what had happened.

I hoped people who claimed to love me would care when their behavior caused pain.

I hoped that apologies would become more sincere, promises would become more reliable, and occasional moments of kindness would grow into consistent safety.

I hoped family gatherings, gifts, photographs, nicknames, and familiar traditions might someday reflect genuine connection instead of creating its appearance.

Whenever something kind happened, I treated it as evidence that the deeper relationship I wanted was beginning to emerge.

Whenever the harm returned, I searched for another explanation.

Perhaps they were stressed.
Perhaps they did not understand.
Perhaps I had communicated poorly.
Perhaps I was asking for too much.
Perhaps they needed more time.
Perhaps the next conversation would be different.

The hope lived through every contradiction because I was not responding only to who they repeatedly showed themselves to be.

I was also responding to who I knew they were capable of becoming.

That is what makes these relationships so difficult to release.

The people involved may possess genuine humor, intelligence, generosity, tenderness, or charm. Occasional warmth can make us believe that the relationship we need is finally emerging.

But the relationship I kept trying to reach required more than possibility; it required participation.

I was not imagining my love for them; I was imagining that my love, patience, clarity, and effort could eventually make the relationship mutual.

No amount of love from one person can perform another person’s part.

When Hope Becomes a Survival Strategy

It is easy to look back and wonder why we kept hoping for so long.

Why did we believe another explanation might help?
Why did we accept another apology?
Why did we keep waiting for people to become who they repeatedly promised—or merely had the capacity—to be?

But a child living in an unsafe family cannot assess the situation with the freedom, knowledge, and power of an independent adult.

Children depend upon their caregivers for food, shelter, protection, belonging, and their earliest understanding of reality.

Recognizing that the adults in control may be unable or unwilling to provide safety can be emotionally unbearable.

It may feel more survivable to conclude that the problem is something within us:

If I am causing this, perhaps I can stop it.
If I am too sensitive, perhaps I can become tougher.
If I am difficult to love, perhaps I can make myself easier.
If I communicate perfectly, perhaps they will understand.
If I anticipate everyone’s needs, perhaps nobody will explode.
If I become useful enough, perhaps they will finally value me.

If I ask for nothing, perhaps I will no longer be treated like a burden.

The belief that we can earn safety gives us the illusion of control when genuine control is unavailable.

That illusion can keep us going.

It may inspire us to study every shift in another person’s mood, make ourselves smaller, assume responsibilities that never belonged to us, and work tirelessly to prevent the next conflict.

We learn to read the room before checking in with ourselves.

We become skilled at managing everyone’s emotions while losing contact with our own.

Hope becomes less like a joyful expectation and more like a survival assignment: try harder. Stay longer. Give more. Need less. Do not make another mistake.

Perhaps tomorrow will finally be different.

For someone raised this way, leaving the relationship in adulthood may feel like more than setting a boundary.

It can feel like abandoning the organizing belief that helped us survive childhood: the belief that goodness, perfection, patience, or sacrifice will eventually make unsafe people love us safely.

Letting go of that belief can initially feel like despair.

If my effort cannot change them, what was all that effort for?
If they always possessed the capacity to act differently, why did they not choose it for me?
If I was never the cause, why was I required to carry all the blame?

These questions can be devastating; they force us to confront how much energy we spent solving a problem that was never ours to solve.

But this realization also begins returning responsibility to its rightful place:

A child should not have to regulate an adult’s anger.
A child should not have to become perfect to deserve protection.
A child should not have to absorb mistreatment to keep a family together.
An adult survivor should not have to continue performing those roles to prove that their love was real.

The hope was not foolish; it served a purpose when acknowledging the full reality might have been too dangerous or overwhelming.

It helped us imagine that life could eventually become safer, even when we had no clear path toward safety.

We can honor what that hope did for us without allowing it to determine what we tolerate now.

The child who believed: if I become good enough, they will change, was trying to survive.

The adult can now answer:

You were already good enough.
Their choices were never proof of your worth.
You did not fail to discover the perfect combination of words, patience, usefulness, and love.
There was no performance capable of doing their emotional work for them.

Perhaps healing begins when hope changes direction.

Instead of hoping endlessly that unsafe people will become different, we can begin hoping for a life in which our safety no longer depends upon them changing.

The Search for the Missing Explanation

Being autistic can add another layer to this pattern—especially when autism remains undiagnosed for most of a person’s life.

Autistic people are not all alike, and no single explanation can describe every autistic relationship or communication style, but many of us grow up experiencing repeated misunderstandings without knowing why they happen.

We may speak carefully and still be told that we said something wrong.
We may ask direct questions and be accused of having a hidden motive.
We may explain a sensory need or limitation and be treated as dramatic, difficult, or disobedient.
We may believe another person’s words, only to discover that we were apparently expected to interpret an unspoken meaning instead.

When this happens continually, we may conclude that successful communication depends upon finding the precise combination of words that other people will finally accept.

I spent years searching for that combination.

I explained what happened.

I explained how it affected me.

I changed my tone, softened my language, added context, removed context, tried speaking, tried writing, waited for calmer moments, and attempted to anticipate every possible objection.

When people insisted that they loved me, I took that claim seriously.

I believed love should create some willingness to listen, protect, understand, and change harmful behavior.

When their actions contradicted their stated values, I searched for the missing information that might make the contradiction understandable.

Perhaps I had failed to communicate the severity.

Perhaps they misunderstood what I needed.

Perhaps I sounded angrier than I intended.

Perhaps my facial expression or tone distracted them from my words.

Perhaps the message was too long, too direct, too emotional, too detailed, or not detailed enough.

This search can become endless because there is always another way to phrase something.

For autistic people accustomed to being told that we communicate incorrectly, it may not immediately occur to us that the other person is responsible for part of the communication, too.

Understanding cannot be created through one person’s effort alone.

Communication requires a willingness to receive information, not merely an ability to transmit it.

Even the clearest words cannot produce empathy in someone committed to defending themselves.

No perfectly structured explanation can make another person value a boundary they feel entitled to violate.

Sometimes people genuinely do not understand; clarification, patience, and mutual curiosity can resolve those situations.

But sometimes communication is not failing.

Sometimes the other person understands enough to know that we are hurt, exhausted, overwhelmed, frightened, or asking them to stop—and they continue because honoring that information would require something from them.

They might have to surrender control.

They might have to admit they were wrong.

They might have to change a convenient arrangement.

They might have to recognize that their intentions did not erase their impact.

They might have to see the autistic person before them as the authority on their own internal experience.

That distinction has been difficult for me to accept.

I wanted misunderstanding to be the problem because misunderstanding seemed solvable; if I could clarify enough, perhaps we could repair the relationship together.

Unwillingness was a much more painful reality.

My late autism diagnosis also helped me understand why I had spent so much of my life overanalyzing interactions and modifying myself.

I had been taught that other people’s comfort was evidence that I was behaving correctly, while my own discomfort was something I should ignore, conceal, or overcome.

Masking became more than hiding autistic traits; it became an attempt to make myself understandable enough, useful enough, and unobtrusive enough to remain safe.

But constantly translating ourselves for other people comes at a cost.

We may become so focused on how we are being perceived that we stop asking whether the other person is treating us well.

We may study their tone while dismissing our own fear.

We may analyze their intentions while overlooking their impact.

We may offer endless benefit of the doubt while receiving none ourselves.

Eventually, the question has to change.

Instead of asking only: how can I explain myself so they will finally understand? we may need to ask:

Have they shown a sincere willingness to understand me?
Do they become curious when I correct an assumption, or do they insist that they know my mind better than I do?
Does clearer communication lead to changed behavior—or merely another argument about why my experience cannot be true?
Am I trying to resolve a misunderstanding, or am I trying to persuade someone that my humanity should matter?

There may not be a missing explanation.

Sometimes we have already communicated clearly.

Sometimes the missing ingredient is not better language from us.

It is care from them.

Potential Is Not Evidence

Seeing potential in another person can be a beautiful quality.

It reflects imagination, empathy, and the ability to recognize that human beings are more than their worst moments.

People can learn; they can seek help, unlearn harmful behavior, accept responsibility, and choose something different.

But their potential is not evidence that this change is occurring.

Potential tells us what someone could do while patterns tell us what they are presently choosing.

That distinction matters because harmful relationships are rarely composed of harm alone.

There may be sincere laughter, shared interests, fond memories, helpful gestures, and moments of apparent closeness.

A person who behaves cruelly in private may also appear loving, generous, or charming in other settings.

These contradictions can make us question our own judgment.

If they can be this kind today, perhaps yesterday was an exception.
If they bought a thoughtful gift, perhaps they finally understand.
If they cried while apologizing, perhaps the pattern has ended.
If they behave well around other people, perhaps I really am the one causing the conflict.that

But isolated moments do not tell us whether a relationship is safe.

A gift may express care—or it may be used to bypass accountability.

An apology may begin repair—or it may function as a reset button that grants immediate access without requiring change.

A promise may reflect genuine intention—or temporary discomfort with consequences.

A pleasant period may signal growth—or simply another stage in a repeating cycle.

The difference becomes visible over time.

The issue is not whether someone becomes perfect; the issue is the direction of their choices.

When someone causes harm, do they become curious or contemptuous?
Do they listen or explain our experience back to us?
Do they take responsibility or reverse the blame?
Do they change their behavior or merely change the subject?
Do they respect our “no,” or begin searching for another way around it?
Do we feel increasingly safe—or increasingly responsible for managing their reactions?

These questions ground us in what is happening rather than what might someday happen.

For much of my life, I gave people credit for transformations they had not chosen because I could see how possible those transformations were.

I confused my ability to imagine a healthier relationship with evidence that we were building one together.

But imagination cannot substitute for participation.

Empathy cannot create accountability inside someone else.

And recognizing another person’s humanity does not require me to gamble my safety on their unrealized potential.

I can believe someone is capable of change without remaining close enough to be harmed while I wait.

I can hope they heal without making my future dependent upon it; hope does not create an obligation to remain available while someone decides whether to change.

I can acknowledge their good qualities without allowing those qualities to erase the larger pattern.

This is not cynicism; it is discernment.

Love may see what is possible, but wisdom also sees what is present.

The Grief of Waking Up

Waking from an ordinary dream can leave us grieving something that never happened.

For a few moments, we may have inhabited another life.

We may have spoken to someone we miss, returned to a vanished place, or experienced a future that felt completely real until consciousness took it away.

Leaving a harmful relationship can create a similar kind of grief.

We do not mourn only what existed.

We also mourn what should have existed, what almost seemed possible, and what we spent years believing might still arrive.

I do not grieve the abuse itself.

I do not miss having my boundaries violated, my reality denied, my needs treated as inconveniences, or my body held in a constant state of alarm.

I do not want to return to the environment I escaped.

What I grieve is the family I should have had.

I grieve the home that should have felt safe.

I grieve the protection that should never have needed to be earned.

I grieve apologies that could have opened the door to repair.

I grieve the ordinary warmth, guidance, curiosity, and care that many people receive without having to beg for them.

I grieve relationships that might have existed if everyone involved had been willing to tell the truth and change.

This grief can be confusing because the people may still be alive; outsiders may assume that separation must be easy because contact could technically resume.

They may suggest that estrangement itself is the source of the pain, as though reopening the relationship would automatically heal it.

But access is not the same as connection.

Proximity does not create safety.

And returning to an unchanged relationship cannot restore the relationship we never truly had.

Sometimes what we miss is not the person as they repeatedly behaved.

We miss the person we occasionally glimpsed, the person they promised to become, or the person we needed them to be.

We miss the possibility.

That loss can be difficult to explain because there may be no single funeral, ending, or moment when the hoped-for relationship officially dies.

The realization may arrive gradually through hundreds of disappointments, broken promises, reversed apologies, ignored boundaries, and conversations that change nothing.

Eventually, we understand that we have been waiting for someone who is not coming.

That recognition can feel devastating even when leaving is unquestionably necessary.

We may grieve the years spent trying.

We may grieve how much of ourselves we abandoned to preserve the possibility.

We may grieve that our love, patience, forgiveness, and insight were not enough to create mutuality.

We may even grieve the belief that one final attempt could have changed everything.

But grief does not mean the boundary was wrong.

Pain does not automatically mean we should return.

Sometimes grief is evidence that we have finally stopped denying how much the relationship should have been—and how much it was not.

There is tenderness in recognizing the child or younger self who kept believing.

She was not foolish for wanting a family.

She was not weak for hoping love would become safe.

She was not wrong to imagine a life in which people listened, apologized, protected her, and cared about the impact of their choices.

She simply believed that the people already around her would be the ones to create it.

Waking up does not require mocking that dream.

It means grieving where we placed it.

The dream of love, family, safety, and belonging was never the problem; those desires remain worthy.

What must be released is the belief that they can only be fulfilled through people who repeatedly require our destruction as the price of staying connected.

Perhaps some dreams do not need to die.

Perhaps they need to be separated from the people who taught us they were impossible.

Losing Faith in the Old Doctrine

The title “Losing My Religion” comes from a Southern expression associated with being pushed beyond one’s limits—reaching a point of frustration where something inside us finally gives way.

For me, the phrase does not describe losing my spiritual faith.

It describes losing faith in an old doctrine about love.

That doctrine was never written in a sacred book; it was taught through repetition, punishment, silence, and expectation.

It told me to try harder, need less, keep the peace, absorb other people’s anger, forgive without repair, accept gifts instead of accountability, remain available because we shared a family title, and believe that enduring long enough would eventually earn love.

I spent much of my life obeying those rules.

When relationships became harmful, I examined myself more closely.

When other people refused accountability, I increased my empathy for them.

When my limits were ignored, I tried to become more capable.

When I was blamed for reactions to mistreatment, I worked harder to hide the reactions.

The doctrine always led back to the same conclusion: whatever is happening, you must be the one who changes.

It did not matter how much I had already changed.

I learned to monitor my tone, suppress my needs, anticipate other people’s moods, tolerate boundary violations, and continue offering grace long after grace had been transformed into permission for further harm.

Each attempt was treated as evidence that I could absorb a little more.

The system did not ask whether I was thriving; it asked whether I remained compliant, useful, and accessible.

Walking away meant breaking faith with that entire structure.

I had to stop believing that love was measured by how much mistreatment I could endure without leaving.

I had to question the idea that forgiveness required continued access, that family titles created permanent entitlement, or that protecting myself was an act of cruelty.

I had to accept that remaining loyal to dysfunctional rules was requiring me to betray myself.

That is what I was losing.

I was losing faith in perfection as protection.

I was losing faith in suffering as proof of love.

I was losing faith in gifts without repair, apologies without change, and closeness without safety.

I was losing faith in the belief that I could rescue a relationship by performing both people’s parts.

This kind of loss can initially feel terrifying.

Even harmful rules offer familiarity.

They tell us what role to play and create the illusion that if we follow every instruction correctly, we can control the outcome.

Releasing them means entering unfamiliar territory without guarantees.

If I am not responsible for keeping everyone together, who am I?
If I no longer measure goodness by self-sacrifice, how do I know whether I am good?
If love does not require unlimited access, what does healthy love actually ask of me?

These questions do not signal moral failure; they are part of leaving a belief system that confused self-abandonment with virtue.

I did not lose my capacity to love.

I stopped treating love as an obligation to remain where love was repeatedly used against me.

I did not abandon hope.

I stopped placing all of it in people who expected me to carry the consequences of their choices.

I did not give up on family.

I stopped pretending that shared blood, history, or titles could create the safety, reciprocity, and care that behavior had failed to build.

Perhaps “losing my religion,” in this sense, was not the destruction of faith.

Perhaps it was the collapse of a false belief: that if I sacrificed enough of myself, someone else would finally become who I needed them to be.

Waking Up Is Not Becoming Hopeless

Recognizing that someone has not changed does not mean believing that nobody ever can.

People are capable of extraordinary growth; they can confront painful truths, seek help, unlearn harmful patterns, make amends, and develop ways of relating that once seemed impossible.

But their transformation belongs to them.

We cannot love someone into accountability.

We cannot explain them into empathy.

We cannot suffer enough consequences on their behalf to make them finally accept responsibility.

And we cannot build a healthy relationship from potential while waiting for their participation to begin.

Waking up from that hope is not the same as becoming cynical.

The lesson is not that everyone will hurt us, trust is foolish, or people should be abandoned after a single mistake.

Healthy relationships require patience, grace, communication, forgiveness, and room for human imperfection.

The difference is whether those qualities travel in both directions.

When genuine change is taking place, we do not have to imagine it. We can gradually observe it.

The person becomes able to hear what happened without immediately denying, minimizing, or reversing the blame.

Their apology names the harm rather than merely expressing regret that consequences followed.

They respect a boundary even when it disappoints them.

They seek repair without demanding immediate forgiveness, reassurance, or restored access.

Their behavior remains different after the crisis passes and the threat of losing the relationship no longer feels immediate.

They accept that rebuilding trust may take much longer than speaking an apology.

Change becomes a pattern of its own.

This does not mean growth will be perfectly linear.

People may become defensive, misunderstand, or fall into an old habit.

The question is what they do next: do they recognize the pattern and return to accountability—or use one imperfect moment as permission to abandon the work entirely?

Healthy hope can leave room for growth while remaining grounded in evidence.

It says:

I believe you are capable of changing, but I will not pretend you already have.
I can appreciate your apology while watching what follows it.
I can wish you healing without making myself available for further harm.
I can remain compassionate without surrendering discernment.
I can revise my understanding if your sustained choices give me a reason.

This kind of hope does not require us to close our hearts. It asks us to stop leaving them unguarded in places where their openness is repeatedly exploited.

I still want to see possibility in people.

I do not want what happened to make me suspicious of every act of kindness or incapable of trusting anyone.

I do not want my family’s choices to convince me that safe love, accountability, or reciprocal connection are imaginary.

But I am learning to place hope where reality can meet it.

I can notice potential without treating it as a contract.

I can celebrate growth without inventing it.

I can recognize someone’s humanity without denying my own.

And I can allow patterns—not titles, promises, gifts, guilt, or wishful thinking—to inform how much access a person receives.

Waking up does not mean that the dream of love was foolish.

It means I no longer confuse dreaming about a healthy relationship with actually living inside one.

What Was a Dream—and What Is Real Now

The dream was not meaningless simply because it happened while I slept.

It drew from a real history of entitlement, boundary violations, explosive reactions, blame, and attempts to cover harm without repairing it.

When I woke, the lyric did not mean that none of those things had ever happened; it meant they were not happening around me now.

I woke somewhere else.

The people from the dream did not have immediate access to the room; I did not have to appease them, explain myself, manage their reactions, or find the exact words that might prevent another escalation.

I had already done what once seemed impossible: I left.

I established boundaries.

I survived the consequences of refusing the role assigned to me.

I began learning that my body, time, energy, space, and future belong to me.

The past remains real; its effects did not disappear when I crossed a threshold, and healing has not followed a simple or painless path.

My nervous system still remembers what my present surroundings no longer contain.

Dreams may reopen old rooms even after waking life has closed their doors, but memory is not the same as captivity.

A trauma response is not proof that I am still powerless.

And the presence of grief does not mean I made the wrong decision by leaving.

The other dream—the belief that I could become perfect enough to make everyone change—also deserves to be named honestly.

It helped me survive when I needed hope; it gave the child I was a reason to believe that love, safety, and belonging might eventually become possible.

I do not need to blame her for believing.

I can honor her patience, courage, imagination, and enormous capacity for love.

I can also tell her what nobody told her then:

You were never supposed to earn protection by enduring harm.
You were never responsible for teaching adults how to care about you.
You did not fail because your suffering could not transform them.
Their unrealized potential was never your life assignment.

The dream of changing them was not mine to fulfill, but the deeper dream was never truly about them.

It was about a safe home.

It was about being known rather than managed.

It was about love that listens, relationships that repair, and belonging that does not require self-erasure.

It was about having room to create, rest, speak, need, grow, and remain fully human.

That dream is not dead; I am simply no longer waiting for the people who harmed me to build it.

I can create parts of it through the boundaries I maintain, the truth I tell, the work I make, the people I allow close, and the communities I help nurture.

I can learn to recognize love through its behavior rather than its title.

I can place hope in relationships where care travels in both directions.

Waking up does not mean abandoning hope.

Sometimes it means placing hope somewhere reality can finally meet it.

I can grieve who they might have become without continuing to sacrifice myself to who they repeatedly chose to be.

I can release the future I imagined for those relationships without releasing my belief that a different future remains possible for me.

The nightmare was once my reality; the false hope helped me endure it.

But I am awake now, and I do not have to remain inside the nightmare to prove that my dream of love was real.