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To the Girl I Was and the Girl That Is

You are beautiful.

By Heather ClarkePublished 7 years ago 3 min read
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Me at 18, Photo Credit Andrea Harlost

Dear Beautiful Girl,

I want to take this moment to tell you that you are beautiful right now. Your beauty isn't something that is going to happen once you find the perfect shirt, get the best manicure, take the most loved Instagram photo, or start dating the "right" person. Your beauty is in you, as you are, right now.

It took me years to see that. I'm no Hollywood starlet, and I spent most of my adolescence and early twenties lamenting that fact. I hated having pictures taken of me, and I criticized every single one I saw of myself. I was always too fat, thighs too thick, too tall, too something. I was always seeking some future version of myself that would be lovable and pretty.

It wasn't until I was about twenty-six that I stopped buying fashion magazines. I had read somewhere that the subliminal messaging of the "corrections" that magazines do to women's bodies damages our ability to see ourselves clearly. So, New Year's resolution time, I swore off magazines.

It was so hard. So incredibly hard. I missed the clothes, the makeup, the hair trends, and I really missed all the workouts that I was never going to do. But, slowly, I stopped missing them. I started reading different things and seeing myself differently. I began to value my mind more, and my insane sense of humor, but I still didn't think I was pretty.

Then, when I was home for a trip, my mother and I went through some old photographs of me from high school. I was caught off guard by how adorable I was. I wasn't fat at all. I was curvy. I wasn't too tall at all. I was statuesque. And the realizations just kept coming. I wasn't ugly, not even when compared to other people. I was freaking stunning, and completely oblivious to that fact.

Beautiful girl, I see you. I see you trying in a way I never had to. I see you with your Instagram account, your Twitter feed, and your Facebook page. I see you desperately posing at family gatherings trying to capture the perfect angle of your face, your body. I see how the judgement and evaluations come from so many more sides than they did when I was your age. Every family photo, every class picture, all of them posted online to be weighed and measured not only by you anymore, but the world.

Women and girls who are unable to see their beauty in the moment only serve to help others. You help the guy who wants to date you because even though you're way out of his league, you are so blind to your charms that you think he's out of yours. You buy all the makeup the magazines say you should because that is how you'll become pretty enough, right? You plan all the diets and workouts, even though there isn't an ounce of anything on your body that shouldn't be. You filter and crop your body until the pictures of you don't look like you anymore. You add apologetic tags to your posts as though hesitant to recognize that you might just be wonderful the way you are.

So dear, beautiful girl, I say that enough is enough. You are enough. If you want to get healthier, do it for you but love yourself through that process. If you want to play with makeup, play. However, never do it because you think you are lacking something. It takes so much courage to live in the world at all. Don't waste time hating pieces of yourself that don't match some filtered online ideal. Don't wait until you're almost 30 to see that you were beautiful at 17. Love is now. Life is now. Be brave and be beautiful.

beauty
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About the Creator

Heather Clarke

Wine loving adventurer with a gypsy soul and an artist's heart. @itsmyfitnessjourney_now

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