One Day You'll Be Cool

We spend our lives waiting for the day we’ll finally be beautiful. Or successful. Or loved. We call it a glow-up, like one day we’ll wake up and the version of ourselves we’ve been dreaming of will suddenly appear, fully formed, ready to take on the world.

I don’t know when it starts. Maybe it’s when you first see yourself reflected in someone else’s eyes and realize you don’t quite match the image they want. Or maybe it’s when you’re scrolling late at night, staring at people who seem to have figured it all out—their flawless skin, their perfect angles, the way their lives seem wrapped in a kind of light you’ve never felt on your own.

And so, you wait. You tell yourself it’s coming. One day you’ll look in the mirror and finally see it—the glow, the transformation. You’ll be the person you’ve always wanted to be, the person the world wants you to be. And when that day comes, everything will fall into place.

But until then, you live in the meantime. The space between who you are and who you think you should be. You wear clothes you don’t really like because you’re waiting to have the body you think deserves them. You take half-hearted steps toward goals you’ve already convinced yourself you’re not ready for. You scroll through social media, watching people who seem to have already arrived at their own glow-ups, wondering when it’ll finally be your turn.

It’s exhausting, isn’t it? The constant postponing of yourself. The way you keep pushing your life forward, promising that one day you’ll show up fully, but not yet. Not now. You convince yourself that the current version of you isn’t enough, that your real life can only begin when you’ve been polished and perfected.

And it’s not just about looks. It’s about everything. We wait for the perfect moment to start living. To fall in love. To take risks. To believe in ourselves.  I’ll do it when I’m ready. When I’m better. When I’m someone worth rooting for I’ve been telling myself ever since I can remember.

But what no one tells you is that the glow-up you’re waiting for doesn’t exist. Not the way you think it does. There’s no magical moment when everything clicks into place and you become the best version of yourself. The glow doesn’t come all at once. It comes in pieces, in moments, in quiet victories that often look nothing like what you imagined.

And sometimes, you don’t even notice it happening. You’re so busy waiting for the grand reveal that you don’t see the way you’ve already started to change. The way your laugh has softened, or your strength has grown. The way you’ve started to show up for yourself in ways you didn’t before.

But here’s the cruelest part of it all: while you’re waiting for your glow-up, life keeps moving. You miss things. The chance to love people who already think you’re enough. The chance to wear the dress now, to take the photo now, to say yes to the life that’s already in front of you.

I’ve been there. I still am, in so many ways. I’ve spent years promising myself that one day, I’ll finally be the person I’m supposed to be. That I’ll look back at this version of myself and barely recognize her. But the truth is, that day never comes—not the way I want it to. There’s always something else, another reason to wait, another excuse to delay.

The irony is that when I think about my younger self—the one who believed in the glow-up more than anything—I don’t see someone who needed fixing. I see someone who deserved to feel whole right then, exactly as she was. Someone who spent too much time believing she was a work in progress instead of realizing she was already a masterpiece, messy and unfinished but alive and real.

We all deserve to glow, but not quite the way society tells us to. Not in perfection, or in meeting impossible standards, or in waiting for some future version of ourselves to finally show up. The glow is in the living. In the now. In the parts of yourself you overlook because you’re too busy chasing something you don’t even realize you already have. You already are cool.