The Glass Ceiling Has Already Been Broken

As much as I hate to admit it, I was a bit of a nerd growing up.  Okay, maybe even a prodigy.  I loved school, loved learning, and especially loved to read (so much so that to punish me, my mom would take my books away).

I started my own blog at the age of fourteen and began attending my local community college at age fifteen — two endeavors that fueled my love for language and writing.  My blog generated enough traffic that I was published on other websites and earned me the privilege of interviewing prominent figures in national politics.  People actually started listening to my opinions both in the classroom and in the real world.  Two years later, I graduated with honors, a 4.0 GPA, the school’s Psychology and Campus President’s awards for academic excellence, and some cool friends. I never thought of my experiences as unusual or unattainable because it was something I wanted to do, so I just…went and did it.

Want to know the beauty of that? I actually could just go and do it. I could dream big dreams at age fifteen and go on to accomplish them and form new ones along the way.  Once I graduate with my Bachelor’s degree, the world is basically going to be my playground.  No real obstacles exist for my success other than my own fear and self-degradation.  As Maya Angelou put it, “I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass.”  It’s time for us, the women of the Millennial generation, to take Maya’s advice and grab life before someone convinces us that we can’t.

Don’t be deceived- there are some who will try to keep us down. There are throngs of people who are terrified of what a confident, independent generation of young women would mean for the future.  They tell us that we need their help, that we need to become dependent rather than independent, and that being a woman is something that we should be ashamed of. They tell us that in order to succeed, we have to alter the definition of a woman and comply with new standards that are totally unrealistic and unreachable.  They feed these lies to us with the hope that constantly repeating such falsehoods will eventually convince us that they must be true.  Unfortunately, it does work sometimes; if we say enough that the sky is purple, we just might convince someone that that color up in the sky really isn’t blue. It might make that person start questioning what they know to be true.  The same is happening to young women, and it’s time for us to stand up and declare that the sky still is blue and that we can still accomplish anything we set our minds to.

Women are already leading the world in many ways and are making huge breakthroughs in others. Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, is only forty-years-old and already one of the highest-paid CEOs in the world. Taylor Swift is a twenty-something who has already conquered two genres of music and sold millions of albums in the process. Ellen DeGeneres is an extremely successful talk show host who keeps her captivated audience on its toes with her quick-witted humor. Tory Burch is a self-made fashionista who is worth $1 billion. Jennifer Lawrence is a young actress who has taken Hollywood by storm.  And while we haven’t had a female U.S. President (yet), we have women on both sides of the aisle — Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady and Secretary of State, and Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard — who are proving themselves to be serious competitors in their respective races.

Those are just a few of the women who have made it to the top of the social food chain. How did many of them get there? By refusing to concede men’s successes as detrimental to their own.  By refusing to believe that a “glass ceiling” was holding them back. By blocking out their haters and keeping a narrow focus on their dreams, they accomplished those dreams. The path has been paved for us, fellow females!

As Alice Walker once put it, “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”

It’s time for young women to reject the notion of perpetual victimhood, to reject the notion that any person or idea or movement is holding us back. In the world of dream-chasing, the sexes are generally provided with the same tools with which to work, and the sky’s the limit.  Don’t stay on this side of your dreams for fear of an imaginary barrier.

The glass ceiling has already been broken.

Nothing is holding us back.