This article will have a bit of a somber start, but stick with it. Last summer, I found myself in the cancer wing of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. It was about eight o’clock in the morning, and I’d just left my father with a nurse who was going to take him up to surgery. I sat in the waiting room, hearing families cry over loved ones with devastating prognoses. Fortunately, the doctors caught my dad’s cancer at an early stage, and they were able to remove it all, but it really got me thinking about life in a big picture sort of way. In short, it got really freaking real, really fast.
Because we’re so young, it’s so easy to exist in a sort of haze in which you can waste days or weeks at a time just getting by. Not living, just going through the motions and settling for the same, safe routes. We think it’s okay to go with the grain and go with what’s comfortable because our time seems unlimited, but it’s not. It took my father getting sick to shake me out of that illusion, and I hope I can shake you out of it, too.
The reality is, there is no doing it tomorrow, or next month, or in five years. Isn’t it a bit ridiculous to live that way when time isn’t promised to you? Life is so, so temporary and fragile, which is scary, I know. But it’s also beautiful and stunning and miraculous and most importantly, yours.
You can and should dream up anything you want for your life. Everyone has dreams, whether they’re actively pursuing them or not. None of us should be complacent or living life without a fire lit under us every day. If you’re reading this right now, you probably have so many opportunities at your fingertips — a college education, internet access, people who support you. You’re already so blessed with what you need, so get going!
Fill your mind with a dream right now. You know what it is. It’s where you want to be, that vision that sparks something in you. Are you making progress towards it every day? At the bare minimum, are you happy right now? What’s keeping you from being happy? If you believe in yourself enough, maybe you can get rid of whatever’s holding you back.
My point is, you have to be ruthless when it comes to your happiness. Never settle. Never accept. That’s no way to live life. Instead, I challenge us women to decide, to act, and to believe in ourselves. You’re in the driver’s seat of this thing called life, so act like it! You have to make your life what you want it to be instead of receiving your life passively.
Life is too short for f*ckboys. Too short for losing hours to Netflix every day. Too short for staying stuck in an unhappy, unfulfilled place. Life is too short to hesitate and procrastinate… We have to be braver.