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After years of trying, I became an "overnight success." See the contradiction here?
“It’s expensive to be poor.” I heard the last words of my interview with CNN’s Don Lemon as if someone else were speaking them. July 9, 2014 was my 32nd birthday. I was supposed to be out with friends, having secured the rare babysitter for my twins. Instead, I was on national television.It wasn’t right; it wasn’t me. I was the mommy blogger, scraping by, who sometimes did funny things that garnered a few thousand hits to my blog or Facebook page. But the calls kept coming: NPR, Al Jazeera, CNN again, Sirius XM, UpWorthy, TIME Magazine. Now I had television and literary agents calling me. People were thinking this thing was worth money.
When my essay about driving to a food bank in my husband’s Mercedes went viral, people immediately started heralding me as an “overnight success.” It was true in its way. The success itself was overnight. What people don’t realize though is that the luck of going viral was based on a mountain of hard work, on years of effort. There’s a frustrating truth to success in the Internet age: in order for your work to reach an audience, someone with power has to give it a chance, and in order for someone in power to give it a chance, it has to have an audience....
"Instant success" arrived after 5 years of hard work for former TV producer Darlena Cunha. Inspiration for those who sometimes are ready to give up.