The Part of the Story I Never Tell

You've seen how I started.

You've seen where I am now.

I've never told you about the part in between — and it's the part that almost didn't work.

We don't post the middle. I understand why. The middle doesn't photograph well. There's no ribbon to cut, no milestone to announce, no before-and-after that fits in a square. So we skip it. We post the start, we post the wins, and we quietly let everyone assume the line between them was straight.

It wasn't. Not for me. Probably not for you either.

So here's the part I never tell.

The doubt years

For the first two years, I was doing this completely alone.

No model to follow. No one a few steps ahead of me on the trail who could look back and say "that thing you're feeling right now — that's normal, keep going." Just me, trying to build something that didn't exist yet, with no way to tell the difference between this is hard because it's supposed to be and this is hard because I'm doing it wrong.

So I assumed I was doing it wrong. That's what you do when no one tells you otherwise. Every slow week felt like evidence. Every unanswered email felt like a verdict.

I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because I think a lot of you are sitting in exactly that spot right now — reading everyone else's highlight reel, watching your own pace, and quietly deciding the gap between them means something is wrong with you.

It doesn't. I promise you it doesn't.

The part I never say out loud

Around the two-year mark, I almost quit.

Not pharmacy-school me — young, unsure, easy to imagine giving up. Established me. Experienced me. The version of me who, on paper, looked like she was doing fine.

I had put in twenty-four months and I could not see the top of the mountain. I'd done the work, and the work hadn't paid off yet, and I ran out of the thing that keeps you going when there's no evidence. I told myself I'd try one more time. Then one more time after that. That's not grit. I don't want to dress it up as grit. It was just that I couldn't quite make myself quit on a day when quitting would be final.

That's the beat that never makes the highlight reel. The night you came closer to walking away than anyone around you knew.

I was, it turned out, about five feet from the thing I was reaching for. But you can't see that from inside the fog. That's the cruel part of the middle — the moment you're most likely to quit looks identical to the moment right before it works.

Here's what I want you to hear

If you're in the middle right now — if it feels slow, and lonely, and not fast enough, and you've started to wonder whether that means you weren't built for this —

you're not wrong that it's hard.

You're wrong about what the hard means.

Hard is not the sign you weren't built for this. Hard is the sign you're growing. Those are two completely different things, and almost everything depends on being able to tell them apart. The slow part isn't the detour. It's the road.

Nobody's overnight success was overnight. They just stopped posting during the middle.

I'm still in it

I'm not writing this from the summit. I want to be honest about that too.

I'm writing it halfway up — hair up, gross after physical therapy for my hip, still reaching out to providers, still enrolling patients, still building a team, still answering every message myself. The middle didn't end when things started working. It just changed shape. That's not a warning. It's a relief, actually — it means the goal was never to escape the middle. It was to stop climbing it alone.

Because that's the one part I'd take back if I could. Not the work. Not the no's. Not even the slow years. The alone.

I did the lonely version for two years, and the lonely version is what made it take two years. You don't have to do it that way. That's the whole reason I do what I do now — so the next pharmacist in the fog has someone a few feet up the trail saying keep going, this part is normal, I've been exactly here.

The middle is messy. That's not a flaw in your climb. It is the climb.

And you don't have to do it alone.

I wrote the fuller version of this — including what the build actually looks like stage by stage, and the two things that cut years off the climb — over on my Substack, Prescribed Change. It's free this week, no paywall. The link's in the comments.

And if you'd rather hear it than read it: this all came from the newest episode of The Dose, "The Messy Middle". I recorded it raw, hip recovery and all, and left it exactly as it came out — it felt like the only honest way to publish this one.