I Dreamed A Dream

In 2020, I sang I Dreamed a Dream at the Jazz Cabaret festival.

Until that point, I had never sung a slow song on stage. Most of my performances had been upbeat, playful, or comedic. But my best friend — who is wildly talented — suggested I sing that song and try something different.

It was not the obvious choice for me.

But I committed to it.

In the early rehearsals, I struggled to find the story inside the song. I could feel the weight of it, the sadness in the melody and the lyrics, but it didn’t belong to me yet.

I wore the emotions of it like a coat — heavy on the surface, but not truly mine.

I could perform it.

But I couldn’t live inside it.

Then the artistic director of First City Players gave me a piece of advice that changed how I approached the performance.

She told me to create the story behind the song.

Not just sing the lyrics.

Live inside them.

So I did.

At the time, my mom had just come through a serious mental health crisis.

For most of my life, her struggles had created waves of instability, heartbreak, and confusion. But in the months leading up to that performance, something had changed.

For about nine months, it seemed like she was doing better.

Really better.

For the first time in my life, I let myself believe something I had always wanted to believe — that maybe the difficult chapters were finally behind us.

That maybe I finally had the mom I had always needed.

And then, about a month before the performance, everything collapsed again.

The fragile stability I had begun to trust disappeared almost overnight. The hope I had been carefully holding onto shattered, and I found myself right back inside the same heartbreak, confusion, and fear I had known so many times before.

It was devastating.

Because it wasn’t just the crisis itself.

It was the loss of the dream. The loss of the moment where I thought things were finally different.

So when I prepared the song, I changed one word in the lyrics.

Instead of singing about him, I sang about her.

And suddenly the story wasn’t abstract anymore.

It was mine.

When I stood on that stage, I wasn’t just performing a song from Les Misérables. I was singing about hope. About the fragile dream that something broken might finally be whole.

The audience didn’t know the full story, but they felt it.

People cried.

And when the song ended, a number of people stood.

It was one of the most powerful performances I have ever given.

Not because of technique or training.

Because it was real.

I haven’t listened to that song since.

Until recently.

I walked into the room just as the movie Les Misérables was playing, and Anne Hathaway had just begun singing that exact song.

The moment I heard it, something in me cracked open.

Emotion rose up before I even had time to think about it. Tears slipped out of my eyes as memories rushed back — the pain of that time with my mom, the hope I carried, and the devastation when that fragile hope collapsed again.

For a moment, I was back inside that story.

But only for a moment.

And yet, hearing the song reminded me that grief doesn’t simply disappear when life changes. Some experiences leave marks that stay with us. That song still holds pieces of the pain I carried then — the hope, the heartbreak, the longing for something that felt just out of reach for so much of my life.

The grief is still there.

Because the truth now is different.

The road between then and now has been long and hard. Healing with my mom didn’t happen all at once. It took time, patience, boundaries, forgiveness, and more heartbreak along the way.

But somewhere in the past couple of years, something real began to take root.

The kind of steadiness and presence I once only dreamed about.

These days, I often feel like I truly do have the mom I always needed.

It just took us a long time to get here.

Hearing that song today reminded me of the woman I was when I sang it — carrying hope and heartbreak at the same time.

It reminded me how much that dream mattered.

And it reminded me that sometimes life takes the long road to give us what we once only dared to imagine.