When I started my senior year, I wanted everything to be perfect.

I tried my best to get the perfect attendance, I made sure to get straight A’s and I participated in every extracurricular possible. All of that in the pursuit of making the end of the year “perfect.” Basically, I was trying to forcibly make my future better. Now, most of the time, we are told that hard work can do anything, but I think that there is one clear exception to this rule: you can’t forcibly change your life; no one is in control of everything. You can certainly improve your life, but you can’t change everything. Someone could do everything “right” and still not feel that anything has gotten better.

That was how I felt for most of my high school experience. I was always trying to get everything right, so I often didn’t let myself focus on the more important things, like just trying to be happy. The phrase, “It gets better,” is often tied directly to this idea of happiness in a wide-spread or spiritual sense, but those changes are not something you can change overnight, despite what every 50-step self help course or “inspirational” Oscar-bait movie wants you to believe.

Happiness, and the ability to be content—the ability to truly say that “it does get better”—comes from small changes. For me, I didn’t get the huge things; I didn’t get into my first, even my second dream college and I didn’t have good attendance at all. If anything, a lot of things got worse. But, I managed to instead focus on the things that did get better.

I grew my nails out for the first time, I bought a lot of cute earrings that I wanted and I got two tattoos, things that I didn’t see for myself when I started this year but that now are the little happy things that I can find in every single day. I spent so much time in high school trying to create that better future for myself that I stopped trying to live in my better present.

We are told so much in our senior year that we need to focus on our futures, that we need to plan out our “five year plan,” that we need to know who we want to be for the rest of our lives before most of us have even turned 18. We spend the last years of our childhood trying to find something else that will be better.

We are always searching for the idea of “it gets better” that we don’t just let ourselves live in the “better” times. My life now compared to four years ago is so much better, and I’m sure that four years from now, when I am graduating college, will be even better. But none of that is going to happen if I don’t just let myself live.

So yes, my senior year was far from perfect, but if you had told 14-year-old me that she would get to walk that stage at graduation feeling confident in herself, she wouldn’t have believed you, and that is the most clear example of “it gets better” that I could ever think of.