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Your Appearance Does NOT Determine Your Value as a Person
It’s 2021 and I cannot believe we still need to have this conversation.
From personal experience, I know how hard it can be to separate what you see as your value as a human being from what you look like. Growing up in this modern world where there’s a constant bombardment of information, selling products for the tip of our heads to the bottom of our feet, to show what is considered ‘beautiful’ and therefore what is not; it’s more crucial than ever to be critical of what we give our attention to. And I remember for a very long time I focused the majority of my energies on having an appearance that ‘pleased’ others. I say this in quotation marks because I was always assuming what others would like. I never ran a survey asking people what type of hairstyle or make-up looked better on me.
And today, the standard we have for what we consider beautiful is the most unrealistic it’s ever been. We see all these models, whether on Instagram or giant billboards (if those still exist), and automatically we compare ourselves to the highly edited, professionally taken picture of a person that has a body that only 0.1% of the population has. It’s crazy to think about how this thing that is so separate from our realities causes us, perhaps, a large amount of stress in our daily lives.
