Your goal as a storyteller isn’t to tell us what your protagonist realizes; it’s to plunk us into the event that causes her to have the realization in the first place. A mistake writers often make is leaping into the scene too late. So they begin just as the protagonist has had the realization, and from there on out she is, indeed, looking at the world through changed eyes. The problem is, we don’t know what happened that finally forced her to wake up and smell the damn coffee, and that’s what we’ve been waiting for.
