In high school, I believed that a breakthrough was supposed to happen at some point and show me what I should be doing with my life and be somehow exciting.

I imagined it would be a single moment where everything suddenly made sense. A life-changing conversation with a friend. The right person, at the right time. A miracle that would come at the right time and pull me out of the darkness and show me bits of light.

That was the moment I waited for. I waited a couple of years in high school. A couple in college. A couple more after that.

I waited, days went by and I felt myself turning into someone I hardly recognised. I was too tired to believe I could change anything myself and so waited for something outside myself to change.

The truth was, I wasn’t waiting for a miracle; I was waiting to feel alive again.

There was a time in my life when everything became heavier than I knew how to carry. From the outside, nothing seemed to be wrong. I could still talk loudly to people about life. I could still laugh at my friends’ bad jokes and completely disconnect for a couple hours at a time. I could still answer questions, say the words everybody wanted to hear, but god, it was so uncomfortable.

“I’m fine.”

Two words that have become a habit and an expected answer in today’s discussions.

I woke up every morning with the same feeling, a strange emptiness that accompanied me before I even opened my eyes and changed my mood 2 seconds after waking up, realising that nothing excites me for today or tomorrow or this week. The most exciting part of my day was often when I was sleeping. My reality was the complete opposite of my dreams. I was who I wanted to be in them – fun, bubbly, excited, full of energy. But actually I was standing still and life was passing me by.

Everyone seemed to have a direction, a purpose, a reason to wake up excited for another day, so I began questioning everything. Was I a different girl? Was there something wrong with me? Why do I feel tired after 10 hours of sleep? Why did my mind keep going back to the same painful thoughts?

The hardest fight was not with the world. That’s when I became that anxious person with critical thought, hard overthinking and just tired of other people. I lost my passion. I loved writing. I might not be doing it perfectly, but what is perfect?

My own thoughts became the worst prison of them all.

I remembered my mistakes. I played back conversations over and over in my head. I thought about things I could have done better in my personal life, in college, and now as a busy adult at my job. I imagined other versions of my life where everything was perfect, and I didn’t have the problems I have now. I compared myself to other people and wondered why I felt so far behind and sad.

I wanted to be someone who knew exactly what they were doing. A person who knew exactly where they were going. Someone who could withstand any challenge without breaking.

But I was not that person.

There was a point when I stopped believing things would get better.

That was the worst part.

Not the sadness. Not the bad times. It was the idea that the future would always feel like the present.

When you're stuck in that mindset, time gets weird. Days can be long. One problem can feel like it’ll chase you forever until you solve it. You forget that feelings are temporary. You forget that all nights, even the longest, come to an end.

I forgot. I couldn’t step outside of this feeling and things in my life changed; I couldn’t be fully happy enough for a friend, have a good conversation with my family, or even be happy when something good happened to me.

I thought I'd be like that forever.

But slowly, something happened to me.

I had been mad at what happened for so long. Angry at people who have hurt me. Frustrated by things I could not control. Angry with myself for not being different.

I kept asking questions:

“What led to this?”

“Why me?”

“What could I have done to prevent it?”

But those questions kept me stuck in the past.

Eventually I started asking something else.

“What can I do now while I am still young?”

That question changed my perspective. There was a time, when I was little, when I was going through this childhood phase where I thought the world revolved around me — and for a moment it really did. I was an only child, so you can imagine the attention I got. I grew up surrounded by that care and attention, only to grow up to realise that as an adult I often find myself alone, with no one here to cheer me up.

I didn’t like what happened, but I accepted it. The feeling I always looked for when I was winning was not there. It meant I stopped wasting all my energy fighting things that already happened. This was very hard for an all time introvert like me. My friends pushed me out of my comfort zone, but I did the hard work. I have listened to thousands of podcasts, read a tonne of introspective books and watched countless films where the story ends with a happy ending. Through all that I started to see the bigger picture. Finally, I understood that I couldn’t change the old chapters, but I could choose what kind of story came next.

I started to see my experiences differently.

The hard times were still hard.

Each disappointment, each failure I encountered, taught me something about myself, the people around me and what I should do.

I began to realise my breakthrough was not one moment.

It was like energy was slowly building up inside me. Looking back, I think it started from the first time I really thought about what was happening to me. I did not change suddenly. It was a slow process that happened over time. The growth was not linear; it came in peaks. There were moments when I felt like I was finally moving forward, and other moments when I felt like I was back at the beginning. But every thought, every difficult moment, and every small realisation added something.

This was my breakthrough. For a long time, I felt like it came too late, but looking back, I realise it came exactly when I needed it. My life did not magically become perfect; I just started teaching myself to look for something positive, to stay hopeful, and to become more confident. The introvert in me is still there. He still asks “why, “when, and “how” about everything. I didn’t get rid of that part of me, I just learnt how to keep it in balance.

Thank you for reading. It means a lot.