Pretty Is Pretty Enough

You’ve never considered yourself beautiful. Pretty maybe, if the lighting is just right and the angles are good, and your hair is being cooperative, and your clothes are falling on your body in a way that doesn’t make it obvious that you have never stepped foot inside a gym. It’s hard to consider yourself beautiful when your Instagram feed is filled with women who wake up looking like they’ve stepped off the page of a fashion magazine, and sometimes you wonder what you’d look like if you had the time, patience, money, and energy to present yourself so perfectly to the world.

However, over the last year, you’ve noticed something unsettling. With more and more women speaking up about how much editing goes into a 30-second Instagram reel, your envy has changed into a distinct kind of sadness. Everyone’s not editing their flaws anymore; they’re editing themselves. They’re taking their perfectly normal human bodies and making them thinner, fairer, and spotless to fit a standard that was never meant to become a standard. It's scary watching someone you’ve always thought was beautiful become unrecognizable, and the worst part is, you can’t even blame them. Instagram comments are a very specific kind of hell that no one deserves, but every time you put yourself publicly on the internet, it seems like there are people just waiting to tear you down. You’ve always believed that people have a right to their opinion, no matter how stupid it may be, but it is appalling to watch people make public dehumanizing comments about people they find unattractive. It feels like they get a sick kind of joy in letting people know exactly what they think is wrong with them. In a hell like this, it is easy to believe that the safest way to put yourself out there is by erasing everything a billion people could consider a flaw and shoving yourself into a conventionally attractive box. The goal is to be attractive to everyone right? Perfect tiny noses, eyes that don’t look too big for your face, lips that are full, skin that looks like it’s just been unpackaged, and hair that’s been tortured so much with heat and water that it doesn’t even feel like a part of you anymore. It takes so much work to maintain, and you hate what you look like without it, but it's worth it right? Or at least it will be worth it until the next trend comes along and you have to start from scratch. Skinny is fine, but flat isn’t in anymore. Are you even a woman if you don’t have boobs that can be seen from miles away? It’s exhausting, having to keep up, but once you’re in the race, quitting stops feeling like an option.

Once you see it, you start seeing it everywhere. Everyone’s so busy trying to look like someone else that they forget how to look like themselves, which is a tragedy. What you look like is a small but important part of who you are, and in a world of more than a billion people, there is definitely someone out there who looks at you and thinks you’re the most beautiful person to walk the face of the earth.

That being said, there are still a lot of people out there who think it is their god given right to make you feel bad about yourself either because pulling you down makes them feel better about how empty their lives are or because making you feel like you’re not enough as you are is going to make you empty your pockets for whatever miracle product they’re planning to sell to you. And well, sometimes your hatred for them can fuel your self-love because spite is a great motivator.   

It's such a tight rope to walk, but it’s one you walk every single day. There are good days and bad but sometimes, when you’re in the mall, watching a teenage girl try on earrings and smile at her reflection in the mirror with stars in her eyes, or when you’re scrolling through a comment section filled with women complimenting an older women’s beautiful wrinkles, you realise all hope is not lost. We’re taught to hate our bodies, so maybe, just maybe, we can learn how to love our bodies too, simply because they belong to us.