IS IT MEANT TO BE, OR AM I JUST FORCING IT?

There's a version of ambition that says the harder something is, the more it must be worth. If it were easy, everyone would do it. That line has a way of embedding itself early and then running quietly in the background for years, deciding which discomforts get tolerated and which get mistaken for signs.

But there's a second, quieter question underneath that one, and it doesn't get asked nearly as often: what if the difficulty isn't proof of anything at all? What if some of it is just friction, and some of it is you, personally, jamming a key into a lock that was never going to open?