Dreams, Struggles, and Breakthroughs

The dream showed up uninvited at 2 a.m. on a Thursday.

I was wiping down tables at Rico's Diner, the same tables I'd been cleaning for seven years, when I caught my reflection in the window. Thirty-four years old, smelling like french fries and burnt coffee, with a notebook of unpublished stories shoved in my locker and a life that looked nothing like what I'd imagined at twenty-two.

That's when the tears came. Not the polite kind you can blink away, but the ugly, soul-deep kind that taste like regret and exhaustion.

My manager, Carlos, found me sobbing in the supply closet between the mop buckets and industrial-sized ketchup bottles. Not exactly the backdrop for a breakthrough moment, but sometimes transformation finds you in the most unlikely places.

The Weight of "Someday"

I'd been carrying the same dream since college. Writer. Storyteller. Creator of worlds that mattered.

But life had other plans. Student loans demanded payment. Rent came due every month. My mother's medical bills piled up after her stroke. So I took a "temporary" job at the diner, promising myself it was just until I got on my feet.

Seven years later, "temporary" had become my entire existence.

The worst part wasn't the exhaustion or the aching feet. It was the slow death of believing I could be anything more. Every month, I told myself I'd start writing seriously. Every month, fear whispered louder than hope. What if I wasn't good enough? What if I wasted time on a fantasy when I should be grateful for steady work?

So I waited. And waited. And the dream grew quieter with each passing year.

The Question That Changed Everything

Carlos handed me a napkin and sat down on an overturned bucket. He didn't offer empty platitudes or tell me to cheer up. Instead, he asked: "How long are you going to punish yourself for wanting more?"

The question hit like ice water.

I'd spent years feeling guilty for my dreams, as if wanting to write made me ungrateful or unrealistic. I'd convinced myself that struggle meant sacrificing everything I loved until some magical future moment when I'd earned the right to pursue passion.

But Carlos saw through it. "You know what I regret most?" he said quietly. "All the years I told myself I wasn't ready. I was waiting to feel ready. Newsflash—you never feel ready. You just start scared and figure it out along the way."

He stood up, squeezed my shoulder, and went back to the kitchen. But his words stayed with me like a splinter I couldn't ignore.

The First Terrifying Step

The next morning, I did something that felt both tiny and monumental. I woke up at five a.m., before my shift, and wrote for one hour.

No planning. No perfect conditions. No waiting until I had more time, energy, or talent. Just me, a laptop balanced on my kitchen table, and a story that had been waiting years to be told.

It was messy. The words came slow and clumsy, like using muscles that had atrophied from disuse. But I kept going. One paragraph. Then another. Then a page.

When I finally stopped, my coffee was cold and my alarm was blaring. But something inside me had shifted. I'd proven to myself that the dream wasn't dead. It was just waiting for permission to breathe.

The Breakthrough Nobody Tells You About

Here's what they don't tell you about chasing dreams: the breakthrough isn't one big moment. It's a thousand small decisions to keep going when everything in you wants to quit.

It's writing at five a.m. when you'd rather sleep. It's submitting stories to magazines even when rejection emails pile up like unpaid bills. It's believing in yourself on days when the evidence suggests you shouldn't.

Three months in, I got my first rejection. Then my tenth. Then my twentieth.

But I also got my first acceptance. A small online magazine, no payment, just the sacred gift of seeing my name in print next to words I'd bled onto the page. I cried in the diner bathroom during my lunch break, holding my phone like it contained proof I was real.

Six months later, I sold my first paid piece. The check was small enough to feel almost insulting, but I framed it anyway. It was evidence that the impossible was becoming possible, one stubborn step at a time.

What I Know Now

A year after that supply closet breakdown, my life looks different. I still work at Rico's—bills still exist, after all—but now I'm a writer who waitresses instead of a waitress who dreams about writing. The shift in identity changed everything.

I've learned that struggle isn't a sign you're on the wrong path. Sometimes it's proof you're on the right one, and the resistance you feel is just fear disguised as practicality.

Dreams don't require perfect timing or ideal circumstances. They require courage to start before you're ready and perseverance to continue when it's hard.

The biggest breakthrough? Realizing I didn't need permission from the universe, from success, or from anyone else. I just needed to stop waiting for a version of myself that felt worthy and start building her, one brave choice at a time.

Your dream is still there, waiting. The only question is: how much longer will you make it wait?

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Thank you for reading...

Regards: Fazal Hadi