One of the hardest things to understand as a young adult is that you have time to do all the things that are needed and wanted in your life. The outcome of a person’s existence is not an imprint of what happened in a single chapter in their life. An outcome is cumulative and reflective. It does not care who had braces later than everyone else or who got a car first or who favored heavy black eyeliner all through middle school. Your obituary isn’t going to talk about how you forgot about class pictures and wore the wrong thing and it sure isn’t going to state whether or not you grew out of a chubby phase that lasted all through high school.

Contentment is hard. It can be so incredibly hard to accept the situation you’re in. Some people turn to friends for advice, some turn to faith, others wallow, but no matter the way you chose it is still hard. You could have a pimple in the middle of your forehead or you could be confined to a wheelchair and either way accepting what’s going on is just flat out hard.

The crazy thing is that it is a total no-brainer that the more content with things you are, the easier life will be for you to live. The solution is so simple yet it takes some of us our whole lives to figure out. Why is this? Maybe it’s because as humans we have somehow developed this pre-conceived notion that contentment and improvement can’t and don’t go hand in hand. This seems outrageous. Why on earth is it not a common paradigm that a person can be content with bettering themselves? Do men and women seriously believe that people are either gross and awkward or a stunning supermodel? Do people not understand that there is in fact an in-between? Maybe the media is to blame or maybe it just comes down to the way people mentally, physically, and verbally treat each other.

I believe that the only way to rid yourself of insecurity is to be happy with getting better. You should be comfortable on the inside and the outside, which one comes first doesn’t really matter, and your levels of comfort shouldn’t be expected to snap into place right away. Things take time to mend and grow. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were you.