What do you do when you never feel ready? When the time is never right or when you can’t find the words, when you never get past the draft? What becomes of you when you never “become”? Become special, talented, rich, famous, innovative, original? The things that you were guaranteed growing up. The people that you saw in movies and magazines. The celebrities you idolized. Yeah, sure, not everyone can become a main character, but you, you’re going to be different. You’re going to make it. 

But then the time passes, one year after another, and you can’t find your niche, your place, your rhythm. Maybe you’re well liked, and maybe you’ve still got some looks, perhaps even a little talent for something, but the bills need to be paid and life is moving on so you settle into you. You don’t become the main character or a supporting character, not even an extra. You exist in such a small world: Here one day and gone another. This is the majority, the story that most of us live, and for some reason it never feels enough. 

Our lives have become more complicated over the years. Standards aren’t just high anymore, they are unrealistic. You can’t be born beautiful enough. Having talent without having the looks is useless. Your skill has no value unless you can successfully market it in an oversaturated pool of nonsense. Everyone is competing for their vice. We used to live in a time when our spheres of exposure were incredibly smaller than it is now. Achievements carried more weight when you were competing with far less people, but now, we are competing with the world. How do you ever feel enough when someone online can do it better than you? Even more so, how do you begin to even try if you see the competition in advance? When you know that nothing you produce will ever be as good, or new, or cool as what is out there now. 

I hate success stories. They aren’t encouraging. They hold a mirror to my failures and act as a crystal ball for the things I will never achieve. Little Danny was able to become a doctor after hardship 1, 2, and 3, plus he is still able to eat healthy, go to the gym twice a day, volunteer, and model professionally! I’m being hateful, I know, but I feel exhausted. How much money can I spend to make myself relevant? I used to think that being skinny was the only mark I needed to meet, and boy, have things changed. But I can’t change some things, at least not with surgeries, financial strain, or complete magic. And why? What am I chasing? I know it can’t be happiness. I’m not a liar, I know that the goal is something far more sinister: admiration, vanity, money, success. All at a cost. Sometimes I feel like Dorian Gray. 

I want to become a writer. I made a promise to myself last year that 2026 would be the start of a new journey. I even tell people openly about my goals now, and people are so kind. People believe in me, but I can’t believe in myself. I have spent six months of 2026 thinking about something to write, and no, the blog doesn’t count (this is all a distraction from the main course), and I have written nothing. I am even too ashamed to open up the laptop and stare at the blinking cursor on the white screen. It will come to me, I mutter, but I know it won’t because I am so preoccupied by everyone else. I want to be them. I want to be them all. I don’t understand how I’m so behind the curve. I grew up thinking that I was unique, destined, talented. I used to think that the only thing stopping me was my ability to get started, but was I wrong? Was I doomed from the start? My talents have been confined to mediocrity. 

I thought I knew so much about the world when I was young, and maybe that was true to a certain extent, but getting older is something that you need to experience to understand. I constantly feel plagued by the reality that time doesn’t pause, and I worry deeply about my ability to make impacts that are meaningful to me. I worry that my inability to start will prevent me from ever succeeding, and I worry even more about starting, and failing. I am settled between two rocks, and the sun is fading, along with the time to act. The question is, will I make something of myself or let the world make something of me?