One day you will graduate from high school and go off to college. You will think it’s going to be the hardest 4 years of your life. But you’ll make new friends, find your niche, take amazing classes (and some horrible ones) and grow deeply as a person.

One day you will graduate college, terrified and anxiously looking at your future as if it’s a black hole; it is full of opportunities but incredibly unknown. You will struggle, you will work hard, but you will find a job, even if it’s not your first choice.

One day you will reach your wit’s end at your first “real” job and you will feel as though every step you’ve taken has been in the wrong direction. You will cry at your mistakes and at every bill you must pay, thinking that your financial struggles are too real to handle. But you will make your way through it.

One day you will wake up and realize that you know exactly what you need to do, want to do, are destined to do.

One day you will succeed. I know this for a fact because success does not only look like a six-figure salary or a million-dollar home. Success is finishing every day knowing you survived this crazy world, even if you follow that acknowledgment with “so far.” Success is making your way through your 20s broke, miserable, or both, and slowly figuring out, deciding, and then changing your mind on what you want to do with your life. Success is being alive. Do you see where I’m going with this? It is guaranteed that one day you will succeed because every day you’re alive you’ve already succeeded.

When I was 17 years old, I looked at my future and saw nothing. I couldn’t envision a future for myself because I didn’t think I would be alive for it. I expected that sooner or later I would give up; I almost did once. However, as each day dragged on--some worse than others--I made my way through college, summers at camp, therapy sessions, and found myself at the threshold of the “real world” and again thought, I can’t do this. But I had already done it. I was alive.

I landed a job. I loved the job. I hated the job. I loved it again. I started to realize that there was something else out there I was meant to do, and now I find myself at a new threshold--one that requires me to be incredibly broke for a year, but I find that to be a success. A truly terrifying success, but a future that I can envision for myself.

Success is what you make of it, and if you cannot see the everyday small ones you will never be able to visualize the future ones--the life-changing ones. One day you will succeed, as long as you can recognize that you have already done so.