Your story doesn’t need a dramatic comeback to be worth telling. Steady counts.

Stories get selected for drama, so the ones that circulate are the collapses and the recoveries, which quietly implies that a life without a disaster in it does not count. Most good lives are not shaped like that. They are a long stretch of turning up, with a few hard years somewhere in the middle that nobody made a film about. Steady is harder to narrate and no harder to live.

If you catch yourself half wishing for a crisis to improve the story, that is a sign the standard is borrowed. Try telling your own version with no turning point in it and see whether it is really boring.