A Letter To Those Who Are Questioning Themselves

The things that make you insecure are always going to be there. There is always going to be something that you do not like about yourself. Your role is deciding how you are going to deal with it. Will you try to cover it up? Will you try to change it? Will you pretend it's not there? Will you let it eat away at your confidence? Or will you turn it into something you like?

Here’s the thing, there are healthy and unhealthy ways to deal with our insecurities. The route to accepting those insecurities starts with the bravery to acknowledge, identify, and decide to work on the things that are holding us back from loving everything about ourselves.

We must identify what standards we are judging ourselves on. Most of the things we compare ourselves to today are found on social media, TV, movies, magazines, etc. But, why do we feel the need to look like the people we see there, and not the everyday person we see in school or at work? The people we see in the media are put on a pedestal. They have molded what society sees as the “perfect body” and “perfect look.” It often seems as though they don’t encounter what we do, or just insecurities alone. What most people don’t realize is that their insecurities are in the spotlight and picked out everyday by those who are watching. These individuals are looked at so closely, that every single insecurity they could have is spotlighted and scrutinized. So rather than striving to look like them, we should strive to feel like them. We should strive to be able to look and feel confident even when we have features that may not fit the mold of what society deems “perfect” and “beautiful.”

We must learn to let go of past criticisms. Everyone will have someone point out one of their flaws at some point in their life. The person may mean well, but when someone says something about a feature or trait that you are already insecure about, the comment is taken ten times more personally. Learn to let it go; learn to accept that not everyone around you is going to like every single thing about you and that’s okay. You do not need the approval of anyone but yourself.

We must learn to accept our bodies. No one in the world has the exact same body, for a reason. We are all individuals and striving to look the same as someone else, is unreasonable. We must start practicing the art of non-comparison. No one that we look at is going to have the same story, face the same hardships, or have the same genes as us. Therefore, we must start to love and accept the things that make us different, and the things that make us ourselves.

To quote Ben Platt, “Don’t waste any time trying to be like anybody but yourself. Because the things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful.”