Looking at all results of “your time will come” on Google provides thousands of thought pieces encouraging women to not worry about their lives in the realm of their love life, but that their “time will come,” that they will find full self-realization by means of falling in love. There is an implied narrative that without love women are obsolete – that by falling in love every piece of our life will magically fall into place, that we will be “fixed” when in fact we are not broken.
Life is so much more than falling in love.
It is so easy to fall into this trap, this over-consuming fear that you are missing out on something larger. I think we confuse this feeling, this fear of missing out, and think that it is the absence of love in our lives when in reality we are constantly surrounded by people who love and care for us. We are conditioned to believe that falling in love will solve all of our problems. Look at the movies we watch, the books we read, the televisions programs that we consume daily; they all tend to have one thing in common – girl meets boy, girl falls in love with boy, girl’s life is miraculously better. They live happily ever after. The end. It’s as though falling in love solved all of their problems. Love made them stronger and seemingly better.
You are more than who you love. What's more important is the ability to love yourself.
Loving yourself can especially be difficult with the omnipresence of social media. I know that for me personally, it is so easy to fall into the rabbit-hole of the Instagram universe. It seems as through my Instagram Explore page likes to present me with pretty girl after pretty girl who is my age, more successful and seemingly more beautiful than I perceive myself to be. Pretty girl after pretty girl who is thinner, has nicer clothes and better eyebrows than I do.
Constantly submerging myself into the world of social media is proving to tear down my self-esteem that I spent years building up. You would imagine that being out of high school would have fixed this problem, but social media can be likened to being a perpetual participant in high school social politics. It’s all about what you’re wearing and what you’re doing in hopes to garner the most likes and appear to be having the best time. It is easy to become lost in the likes – lost in the race of looking the most seemingly OK out of everyone else you follow.
My suggestion is to step away from your phone – just for a little bit. Cut back and realize that social media is not everything. Forget the likes and Snapchat stories and the retweets. Everyone is so quick to vilify our generation, to shout from their pedestals that the millennial generation can not even handle looking away from their phones to have a full conversation. While actual members of the millennial generation know this to be a lie and are sick of this trope, that is not my message. I think social media is a great tool and that the technology we have today is straight up awesome, but I also believe that taking a break from social media is not the worst thing in the world. Our constant submergence into knowing everything that is going on is a disease that plagues almost everyone. Everyone feels the need to be up to-the-minute with everything going on always. In a world where this is a reality, stepping away can be impossible. But I promise that unplugging will do you a world of good.
Rather than sit on your phone going from app to app trying to figure out if anything has changed (it probably hasn’t in the last five minutes since you were on Instagram), try and focus on something you love. Read, write, paint, explore, craft, watch some TV even -- just try and relax and not have your brain on maximum overdrive. Go out and do something for yourself, not for the Instagram likes.
Practice this and you will be bound to fall more in love with yourself with each adventure, with each thing that you created, and with each thing you accomplish. Your time will come where you feel like you are the best version of yourself experiencing everything life has to offer. There’s a whole world out there for you to conquer; all you have to do is go.
