I fell into veterinary school the way you fall into a river you didn’t know was there, cold and fast, and by the time I understood what was happening, I was already being carried by it. The conservation work came next, then the conferences, the fellowships, and the scholarships that arrived as an email I read twice because I didn’t trust the first reading. And somewhere in the middle of all that arriving, I noticed a strange thing. None of it stayed. A scholarship would land, the world would tilt in my favour for a day or two, and then the tilt would level out quietly, the way a held breath lets go without you deciding to release it. By the third day I was already scanning the horizon for the next big thing that might make the feeling come back.

At first, I saw this as a healthy kind of ambition. Setting goals, working hard, and looking ahead had always served me well, so it never occurred to me that the habit might also be exhausting me. Every achievement brought excitement, but it also brought an unexpected question: What comes next? Before I had fully experienced one dream, I was already searching for another, and somewhere along the way I stopped believing that where I was could ever be enough.

It took me a long time to understand that the problem wasn’t the dreams themselves. The problem was the role I had given them. Without realising it, I had started measuring my life by achievements, allowing each acceptance, award, or opportunity to reassure me that I was moving in the right direction. That reassurance was real, but it was also remarkably short-lived. Within days, sometimes weeks, the excitement would fade, and I would find myself searching for something else to work towards, convinced that the next milestone might finally bring the lasting sense of fulfilment I was looking for.

What made this pattern difficult to recognise was that it looked so much like success from the outside. I was collecting the opportunities I had once dreamed about, and people naturally assumed I must feel grateful, accomplished, and certain about where my life was headed. I was grateful, but gratitude and contentment are not the same thing. Beneath every new achievement sat the same quiet restlessness, asking me what came next before I had fully experienced where I already was. I rarely spoke about that feeling because it seemed difficult to explain without sounding ungrateful. As my résumé grew longer, the distance between how fulfilled I appeared and how unsettled I sometimes felt grew quietly alongside it.

The change did not happen all at once. There was no morning when I woke up and suddenly felt content with everything I had achieved. Instead, it arrived quietly through a series of small decisions. After every piece of good news, I stopped asking myself what I should chase next and started asking whether I had really allowed myself to experience what had just happened. More often than not, I realised I hadn’t. I had been so eager to move towards the next chapter that I had barely paused to appreciate the one I had spent months, and sometimes years, trying to reach. 

That shift changed the way I looked at my work. I began paying more attention to the process than the outcome, finding far greater satisfaction in long days spent in the field, conversations with mentors, learning new skills, and  showing up more consistently than in the brief excitement that followed an announcement or an award. The recognition still mattered, and I won’t pretend otherwise, but it no longer carried the impossible responsibility of convincing me that I was enough. It became something to celebrate rather than something to depend on.

I also became more honest about the fear that accompanied every new opportunity. For a long time, I kept those feelings to myself because they seemed to contradict the story everyone else saw. From the outside, everything appeared to be falling into place, and admitting that I still felt uncertain sounded almost ungrateful. Yet, the more I spoke openly with people I trusted, the more I realised how common those feelings were. Many of them had experienced the same strange mixture of excitement, uncertainty, and pressure after reaching goals they had once thought would solve everything. Those conversations reminded me that achievements are wonderful milestones, but they were never meant to carry the weight of our identity. They mark moments in our lives; they cannot define the value of our lives. Once I stopped asking every dream to tell me who I was, I found it much easier to enjoy them for what they really were: opportunities to grow, to contribute and to keep becoming, without constantly feeling that I had to prove I deserved to be there.

If you recognise yourself in this pattern, I hope you don’t mistake it for a lack of gratitude or ambition. Wanting things is not the problem, nor is celebrating them when they arrive. The difficulty begins when we ask those moments to provide something they were never meant to give us: lasting certainty about who we are or whether we are enough. Achievements can open doors, affirm that our hard work mattered, and create opportunities we once only imagined, but they cannot quiet every doubt we carry into them. The habit that changed my life was surprisingly simple. I stopped measuring my days by what had been achieved and started paying closer attention to how they were lived. The conversations that stayed with me, the work that absorbed me so completely I forgot to check my phone, the people who cared about me long before another acceptance letter arrived, and the ordinary afternoons that passed without applause gradually became the places where I felt most grounded. Those moments rarely appear on a résumé, yet they have proved far more reliable.

I still dream as boldly as I always have, and I suspect I always will. The difference is that I no longer expect each dream to complete me. I allow myself to celebrate when something wonderful happens, and then I return to the quieter work of building a life that feels meaningful on an ordinary Tuesday as much as it does on the day an acceptance email arrives. Strangely enough, that has made every dream feel richer, because I am no longer rushing through it on my way to the next one.