early success

Something that I think about way too often is how little I've accomplished. I know, I know, I'm fricking 16 years old. Believe me, I make myself aware of that every single day. I am a typical teenage girl times about two thousand percent, in most ways. But there are some outstanding kids out there. I mean, like, spectacularly outstanding. And accomplished. Malala Yousafzai, Tavi Gevinson of Rookie,  LORDE, a slew of award-winning young actors and actresses. They are making literal headlines and advancing VERY IMPORTANT CAUSES. (See: TIME magazine's list of the 16 most influential teens of 2013.)And I'm sitting here next to a couple granola bar wrappers. I know my frustration sounds silly. Those are exceptions. But there is something about desperately wanting to be exceptional like that that produces a very real feeling of anxiety in me, because all I can think of is how easy becoming something and staying something (something being, like, a cultural presence) will be for them. How they will have the world's university admissions committees kneeling at their feet it that's the path they choose to take. Relatively speaking.

Here's Tavi Gevinson on the cover of Bullett, looking like a bad-ass Gwyneth Paltrow circa 1995.

But then again relativity is everything. Sure, I'm a smidgen of dust on the windshield of the world compared to Lorde, but I guess I'm not too terribly off if you put me in a (figurative) pool with every high schooler out there.

And of course, I'm not discounting the fact that all of these remarkable prodigies that I'm thinking about worked extremely hard/did impossibly brave things/basically did God's work on Earth to get where they are. Work that I haven't done (sigh). And obviously I admire them so so so much. I would flip shit if I met Malala or Tavi or Lorde. But the thing is, it's not just them. There are hundreds of potential Harvard applicants out there waiting in the wings with their volunteer trips to Zimbabwe and their own incorporated software companies. And yeah, I know, anything is possible. But what scares me is that I don't think that kind of precocious success is possible for me. Wow, I sound impossibly vain. It's just a national tragedy that I'm not the most amazing person in the world. Sorry about that guys.

So yeah, this is kind of a ridiculous thing to be apprehensive about. I guess I've read enough Malcolm Gladwell to know that. 

But it's there, ya know? And isn't that kind of what teenagerdom is? Being told that the things you're worried about won't really matter in the long run? Question marks???? 

Well, this is thoroughly long/unappealing first post. I need to go listen to some fifties doo-wop to cheer myself up. Something more cheerful next time, I promise, with a maraschino cherry on top. This has been a public service announcement.

- Ana