When Will It Be Me

The First Chance

After I told Alex I was going to start writing, I expected him to laugh.

He didn't.

He just looked at me with that expression I had learned to recognize over the years—the one that said he wanted to believe in me, but wasn't sure he could.

Maybe I wasn't sure either.

I had spent years talking myself out of things before I ever gave them a real chance. Nursing was supposed to be my dream. I had tried to pursue it, tried to finish what I had started, but life always seemed to get in the way. Money, responsibilities, family, work, children, bills. There was always something that needed my attention more than my dreams did.

Eventually, I started wondering if maybe I was the problem.

Maybe I wasn't disciplined enough.

Maybe I wasn't smart enough.

Maybe I just wasn't meant to accomplish the things I dreamed about.

But that night was different.

Something inside me had finally become tired of hearing myself say that.

I didn't know exactly what I was going to do with writing. I didn't have a plan. I didn't have an agent, a publisher, or even a finished book.

I had something much less tangible.

Ideas.

Hundreds of them.

Stories that had been living inside my head for years.

Characters who had conversations with each other while I was driving. Scenes that would suddenly appear in my imagination while I was doing laundry. Romantic situations, arguments, heartbreaks, secrets, twists, and endings that I could see so clearly that sometimes it felt like I was watching a movie instead of imagining a story.

I just never knew what to do with them.

Until that night.

I opened my laptop and stared at the blank screen.

The white page seemed almost intimidating.

For a few minutes, I didn't type anything.

I just sat there.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard.

I suddenly started questioning myself.

What are you doing?

Who did I think I was?

I wasn't a professional writer.

I had never published a book.

I didn't have a degree in writing.

I didn't even know if I could write three thousand words.

But then I remembered what I had said to Alex.

I'm doing it.

So I took a breath and started typing.

The first few sentences were slow.

Painfully slow.

I would type a sentence and delete half of it.

Then I would type another one.

Delete it.

Rewrite it.

Delete that one too.

I almost closed the laptop.

But then something happened.

A character came into my head.

I knew who she was.

I knew what she was feeling.

I knew what she wanted.

And suddenly, the words started coming.

Slowly at first.

Then faster.

My fingers moved across the keyboard as if they were trying to catch up with my thoughts.

I stopped thinking about whether it was good enough.

I stopped worrying about grammar.

I stopped wondering whether anyone would ever read it.

I just wrote.

Before I realized it, hours had passed.

I looked at the clock and couldn't believe how late it had gotten.

I looked back at my screen.

I had written something.

My first chapter.

I sat there staring at it.

It wasn't perfect.

Not even close.

But it existed.

That was something.

For the first time in a long time, I had actually started something and didn't immediately convince myself that I couldn't finish it.

So I kept going.

Chapter two.

Then chapter three.

Then four.

Then five.

The more I wrote, the easier it became.

It wasn't that the stories suddenly appeared.

They had always been there.

I was finally giving them somewhere to live.

When I finished the first five chapters, I submitted them to Dreamy.

Then I closed my laptop.

I didn't expect anything.

Honestly, I was almost embarrassed that I had submitted them.

I told myself that maybe a few people would read them.

Maybe nobody would.

Either way, I tried.

And somehow, that felt like a victory by itself.

Then my phone started blowing up.

One notification.

Then another.

Then another.

At first, I ignored them.

I assumed they were probably regular notifications.

But eventually, curiosity got the better of me.

I picked up my phone.

Someone had commented on my story.

Then another person.

Then another.

People were actually reading it.

And they weren't just reading it.

They were asking for more.

They wanted to know what happened next.

They were talking about the characters.

They were becoming emotionally invested in a story that had started as nothing more than a collection of thoughts inside my head.

I couldn't believe it.

I kept checking the numbers.

The number of readers continued climbing.

Thousands.

Then tens of thousands.

And somehow, before I could even process what was happening, more than 100,000 people had discovered my book.

I stared at the number.

One hundred thousand.

I read it again.

Then again.

I actually laughed because I didn't know what else to do.

I had spent so much of my life believing that nobody would care about the things I wanted to do.

And now there were more than 100,000 people reading something I had created.

Something that had come from my imagination.

Something that had started with me sitting in front of a blank screen wondering if I could even write one chapter.

Then came the number that completely stopped me.

$10,000.

I stared at the screen.

Ten thousand dollars.

I blinked.

Maybe I was reading it wrong.

I refreshed the page.

The number was still there.

I refreshed it again.

Still there.

My hands started shaking.

Ten thousand dollars.

In one week.

I leaned back in my chair.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Eventually, I did both.

Tears started running down my face.

But they weren't tears of sadness.

They were tears of disbelief.

For years, money had been something that caused stress.

It had caused arguments.

It had caused fear.

It had made me feel like I was constantly failing.

I had been told that I didn't know how to budget.

That I spent too much.

That I needed to do better.

I had tried.

God knew I had tried.

I had taken side jobs.

I had tried to pursue nursing.

I had sacrificed things I wanted.

I had even sold and pawned jewelry that my mother had given me just to help us survive financially.

And now, sitting in front of my laptop, I had made more money in one week than I had ever imagined I could make from simply writing the stories that had been living inside my head.

I covered my mouth with my hand.

I couldn't stop crying.

Because this wasn't just about the money.

The money meant something much bigger.

It was proof.

Proof that maybe I wasn't incapable.

Proof that maybe I wasn't destined to struggle forever.

Proof that maybe I wasn't crazy for believing there was something more for me.

Maybe I had just been looking in the wrong direction.

I looked at the laptop again.

That blank screen that had intimidated me only days before suddenly looked completely different.

It wasn't blank anymore.

It represented possibility.

I whispered to myself,

“I told you I could do it.”

For the first time, the voice inside my head wasn't telling me that I couldn't.

It was telling me that I could.

And I wasn't going to ignore it.

I started writing three chapters every week.

Three thousand words at a time.

It became my routine.

When the kids were busy, I wrote.

When the house was quiet, I wrote.

When I had a few minutes to myself, I wrote.

Sometimes I was exhausted.

Sometimes I stared at the screen for an hour without typing a single word.

Sometimes the ideas came so quickly that I couldn't type fast enough.

But I kept going.

Because now I knew what was possible.

And every time I finished another chapter, I remembered that night sitting on the shower floor.

The night I had cried because I felt like everything in my life was falling apart.

The night I had wondered what I was going to do.

The night, I had told Alex that I needed something different.

I had been convinced that I was stuck.

But maybe I wasn't stuck.

Maybe I had simply been looking in the wrong direction.

Writing didn't just give me money.

It gave me something I hadn't realized I desperately needed.

Confidence.

I had spent years putting everyone else first.

My family.

My husband.

My children.

Bills.

Responsibilities.

Everyone else's problems.

Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten that I was allowed to have dreams too.

Now I was finally doing something for myself.

And I couldn't stop.

The more I wrote, the more stories appeared.

One story became another.

Characters I'd created began taking on lives of their own.

Sometimes I would be doing something completely unrelated and suddenly think of a scene.

I'd stop what I was doing and grab my phone before I forgot it.

I started keeping notes everywhere.

Characters.

Names.

Plot twists.

Romances.

Arguments.

Secrets.

Endings.

Beginnings.

Ideas for books I hadn't even started yet.

It was almost overwhelming.

But it was a good kind of overwhelming.

For once, my mind wasn't filled with ways to survive.

It was filled with possibilities.

I started imagining what my life could look like if I kept going.

I could pay off our debts.

I could save money.

I could plan trips instead of only dreaming about them.

Christmas didn't have to be something I dreaded financially.

I could finally have an emergency fund.

Maybe I could even go back and finish the things I had abandoned.

Maybe nursing wasn't completely gone from my future.

Maybe writing could become something bigger than I ever imagined.

But there was one thing I hadn't figured out yet.

What was I going to tell Alex?

I knew I couldn't keep the full amount of money from him forever.

But I also knew him.

And I knew his family.

If he knew I was making nearly $9,000 a week, the conversation wouldn't simply be about what we should do with our money.

It would become about what everyone else needed.

His parents.

Their bills.

Their problems.

Their emergencies.

Another idea.

Another expense.

Another reason why we should help.

And I wasn't ready for that.

Not yet.

So when Alex asked how much I was making, I told him I was making around $1,500 a week.

It wasn't completely dishonest.

I really was making money from writing.

I just wasn't telling him all of it.

Maybe that made me selfish.

Maybe it made me scared.

But after everything I had sacrificed, I couldn't bring myself to immediately give away the first thing I had ever built for myself.

I wanted to protect it.

I wanted to see how far I could take it.

I wanted to know what it felt like to have something that was mine.

Something I had created.

Something nobody could tell me I wasn't capable of doing.

And so I kept writing.

Three chapters a week.

Three thousand words at a time.

Every chapter was another step away from the woman I had been and toward the woman I wanted to become.

I didn't know where this journey was going to take me.

I didn't know how long the success would last.

I didn't know if the next book would be just as successful.

I didn't know what would happen when people found out how much money I was really making.

And I definitely didn't know how much my success was about to change my marriage and my relationships with the people around me.

But for the first time in my life, I wasn't afraid of the unknown.

I was curious about it.

Because maybe the life I had always wanted wasn't waiting for someone to give it to me.

Maybe I had to build it myself.

Maybe this was my chance.

Maybe this was my calling.

And maybe . . .

Just maybe . . .

This was only the beginning.