I am afraid I have become too skilled at carrying dreams that no longer feel alive

Dear Delyara, I don’t mean I stopped caring. I mean the quality of caring changed. There are things in my life I still move toward because they have been there so long that movement itself became habit. The structure remains. The identity remains. The language around the dream remains. But sometimes I wonder whether the inner pulse is still the same or whether I’m now mostly carrying the shell of something I once wanted more vividly. That thought scares me because it is so hard to distinguish devotion from momentum once you’ve built enough of a life around continuing. I don’t want to betray my own aliveness by calling persistence a virtue when it may sometimes be grief.