"Every day after I wake up, I think, 'Wait... this can't be real; I'm still going to wake up.'"

The voice is suspended between awe and disbelief. Each morning brings a double awakening: the body from sleep and consciousness from incredulity. The pause, held inside the ellipsis, stretches between gratitude and alarm. “This can’t be real” captures the cognitive lag that trails life-altering change; the psyche is still calibrated to an earlier self, so the present registers as a dream that exceeds the limits of prior imagination. Then comes the twist: “I’m still going to wake up.” He has already awakened, yet expects another rupture, as if fulfillment is provisional and reality will soon retract its gift.

Such disbelief can be the flip side of extraordinary achievement. When the world crowns someone as exceptional, the interior self often lags behind, unsure how to inhabit this elevated version of life. The repetition, every day, suggests not a passing thrill but an enduring dissonance, a daily negotiation with a reality that refuses to feel ordinary. It can resemble imposter feelings, or even a protective mechanism: by refusing to fully believe, one guards against the shock of loss, the day success stops, the morning the phone is quiet.

There is humility here, too. Wonder resists hardening into entitlement. Yet the wonder shades into unease, a reminder that external triumphs do not automatically resolve inner questions. After seismic change, medals, fame, expectations, the mind seeks continuity, reaching for the former ground underfoot. Routine may help, the anchor of laps, breath, and discipline; still, the first thought upon waking reveals how long integration takes.

What resonates is its universality. Anyone who has crossed a threshold, falling in love, surviving illness, winning big, or starting over, knows the strangeness of a life that suddenly outgrows the story you carried. The line invites a slow, daily acceptance: to let the miraculous become ordinary without losing its shimmer, to keep waking not just from sleep but into the reality you’ve earned, and to learn, patiently, how to live there.