Wait For It

Photograph by Alexa Lunney

Much of my life has been spent waiting. Waiting for the day where I wake up and have all of life’s answers, where I wholeheartedly possess every and any quality I’ve ever felt I was lacking.

I've spent more class periods than I can count fantasizing about my picture-perfect dream life. I’d be in a frigid classroom wearing sweats and the residue of yesterday’s makeup, chin pressed to my palm, staring at the tragically left behind water bottle and clumps of dust accumulating in the corner of the room. But in my head, I’m at an oceanside villa in Aruba kicking my feet up under the tropical sun and sipping on a coconut. In this dream reality, I’ve got no worries; I’m skinnier, smarter, cooler, prettier, braver, and richer. I am in every aspect an improvement of the poor dreamer back in reality.

Like I said, it was a fantasy. Fantasies are great sources to build your mood board around and motivators to aspire to. However, the more I fantasized about everything I was not, the more I became obsessed with the idea of radical self-improvement. No matter what I would do, I couldn’t help but sit and wonder about how the results would have differed if I were more… whatever. I thought about it so often it manifested itself in everything. Soon enough, my dire infatuation with living up to my fantasies ironically stripped me of my ability to simply try.

Every waking day would be consumed by my preparation to be better than I was the day before and finally become someone I deemed worthy of love, respect, success—everything I’d ever hoped for and desired. Even the submission of this article was delayed by my anxious delusion that I’d miraculously be more equipped to rewrite it better tomorrow.

It was like I was so tired of being disappointed in the me that was present and trying, that I subconsciously started to put my entire life on pause. Performance anxiety, a term usually reserved for theatrical displays in front of large crowds, slowly stunned me. The smallest of actions suddenly felt grand and detrimental to my persona. I developed a toxic mindset of doing something perfectly or not at all, and that’s exactly what I ended up with: nothing.

Hyping up these little actions in my daily life set up such a strict standard that was nearly impossible for me to reach. I would hold off on buying clothes that I loved in fear of “ruining the fantasy” I had of how I would look when I finally “deserved” to wear them. Job applications would pass me by because I wasn’t where I thought I'd be when presented with an opportunity. To my friends’ dismay, I even stopped posting on my own Instagram in fear of defying the image I had previously fantasized about cultivating. We’d go out on the town in cutely curated outfits, our eyes set on spicing up our feeds, yet my section of our shared album would never see the light of day. If my pictures didn’t give the exact vibe I wanted to give off, why even bother posting them at all?

As I write this I think back to a previous article my dear friend Nirvana Ragland ‘25 wrote for Your Mag’s December ‘22 issue. In “Be Fucking For Real,” she outlines the phenomena of hypervigilance and comparison in social media. The effects of people sharing only a highlight reel of their lives makes the average person feel as though they aren’t enough. Hypervigilance makes your life a performance where you’re constantly being perceived. It’s almost like if you do not post about something, it doesn’t exist. So whatever you do, you better do it perfectly, because it exists forever. When everyone else posts, they’re looking their best. When you attempt to, it’s not nearly as cute as you imagined, so why even post this mediocre representation for all to remember you by? So, not only am I holding myself to an impossible standard, but I am now seeing this fear reiterated right in front of me. I am confronted with the rhetoric that you only get one chance to put yourself out there and it shall define you forever.

And maybe it’s just my situational perfectionism that encourages me to submit half-assed essays I can no longer look at, but prevents me from reaching out to a potential employer without my LinkedIn being in perfect order. Or my safeguarded heart that convinces me not to swipe right until I'm totally healed and perfect to date. Or that gnawing reminder that I should put off wearing this dress until I shrink myself into a body that “can actually pull it off.” Maybe it’s just my debilitating fear of looking life right in the eyes, blinking and it’s all gone. It’s easier to stand still and yearn for mere fantasies than to grieve losses, mistakes, and untapped potential. If I prepare myself deeply, I can never fail, never disappoint my family, never disappoint myself.

Over time, I’ve realized you can never prepare yourself for life. Day by day, I’ve started to roll the clip on a previously paused avenue of my life, forcing myself to do the things I want outside the limitations of a preferred timeline.

You will never be perfect, let alone perfectly “ready,” for any aspect of your life. It takes failure to grow and learn and evolve. To those who, like me, have put the weight of the world’s expectations onto themselves just know it’s okay to try.