by Victoria L Cagle

I scroll through Twitter, opening article after article in Safari so I can read them later, and ‘liking’ the tweets of women that I genuinely like (i.e. everyone I follow).  I LOVE it when these women announce they’ve got a new job, or a new book on the way, or publish an entertaining blog post, or are simply just living their lives, doing their own thing.  I’m always happy for their achievements, but I also find myself begrudgingly frustrated with myself.

‘Why am I not a writer for MTV/Teen Vogue/The Guardian/The Debrief/HelloGiggles/insert another publication here?’

‘Why do I not have 10K Twitter followers and 20+ comments on every blog I post?’

‘Why do they look so pretty all the time?  How can I look effortlessly cool?  Do they look like that every single day of normal life?’

And then, every time like clockwork, I remember that I can’t compare myself to these awesome women.  Mainly because I shouldn’t compare myself to anyone except for my past self (#deep), but also because these women are at a completely different place in their lives than I am.

I can’t be a writer for MTV/Teen Vogue/HelloGiggles because I haven’t put in the work (yet).

“I just have so many more years of living left to do.”

I can’t have thousands of followers on Twitter and thousands of clicks on my blog each month, because I haven’t been blogging for long at all.  The blogs I love the most have been around for over five years; I started my blog in December of 2016.

All of the women I admire are over the age of 30.  I’m 21.  

It is literally impossible for me to have careers as prolific as theirs, because I haven’t even lived enough years to be prolific.  Not to say that I haven’t ‘lived’ yet, but I just have so many more years of living left to do.

Instead of being jealous of these talented women, I need to view them from a more hopeful mindset.  Almost all of the women that I love and look up to have talked about how rough their 20s were.  How they were filled with doubt and fear and uncertainty, almost exactly how my life is right now.  I’m not suggesting that my life will be better 9–ish years from now when I reach my 30s, but these great women simply reassure me that my life will be different.  I won’t be 21 forever (I’ll be 22 in October, in fact).  I won’t always be in this stage of my life.  My life will change drastically and I can’t even imagine what my life will be like when I’m 30.

So much will happen to me and I will make so many things happen in the next 9 years.  Someday, maybe when I’m 30 and still writing, a girl in her 20s will read through my blog archives and think to herself, ‘Wow. She’s done so much, her life seems so full.’

Victoria L Cagle | @vitaevictoria | vitaevictoria | edgeofitall.com 

Victoria is a writer from Virginia.  Her goal in life is to write and travel, preferably at the same time. You can read more of her work on her blog.