Beyond Beautiful

"Hang on to your youth, that’s where your power lies," said my mom, staring at the glossy pages of a magazine.

“How To Stay Young With Our 3 Simple Tricks.” "How To Lose Weight and Keep It Off,” said the block letters on the magazine's front cover. As if that’s all women should really care about. When this generation suddenly tries to fit into the new double zero as if a real woman could measure up? We are not all the women in the magazines. Perfectly quaffed hair, carefully tweezed eyebrows, stick figures. Looking at our own reflection in the mirror how could we even compare?
We don’t have top makeup artists, personal trainers and hair stylists around the clock to make us look “presentable.” 

Not only that, but everywhere we look whether that be magazines or social media, we don’t know what unfiltered, not photoshopped means. We are not only raising a generation of insecure self-conscious young girls. But a generation of bulimics, anorexics as if the woman in the mirror is “too fat.” When really, she’s starving herself to look like those size double zero supermodels as if that’s attainable. When those supermodels are photoshopped themselves . But as a generation who grew up on social media, these images are normal right? 

We don’t even think of the photoshop or the filters because all we see is a beautiful girl that we can’t measure up to. We don’t look in the mirror and tell ourselves that we are beautiful we look in the mirror and say “you’re worthless.” “No guy will ever love you.” “Put that food down you fat pig.” As if a guy determines our worth? This disgusts me because not only do we look at these photos and compare, but we look at ourselves and believe we aren’t good enough in the first place.But as we grow old we realize how much value we had as teens and how beautiful we truly were. The frustrating part is as young adults or teenagers we have no idea the power our youth has. Fashion magazines sprawled across the country are covered with young women. So many of the older generations aspire to be us, to keep their youth. Like the old saying goes "You don’t know what you have till it’s gone.” 

So why don’t we truly know how beautiful we are, as young women?

But, it’s not just aspiring to be young it’s getting wary of growing old. As we reach close to 30 women get fearful, but why? 

We are so worried about our looks that we let “the world” tell us that’s where our power lies. So we believe it. The sad part is as we grow old our beauty fades along with our worth. But, we did not even know that we were truly beautiful in the first place. This generation consumes so much social media in a day and young girls are exposed to photoshopped images day in and day out. How do we teach a generation so isolated by social media and photoshop that they are good enough when the likes say otherwise. We might just be the most insecure generation even in our youth we still don’t believe we have that power. You can change that. Get rid of the filters, get rid of the photoshop. As a generation growing even more insecure by the minute. As women, we want to see ourselves for who we are, not what pants size or how young we are. 

As women we are beautiful because we are REAL. Do you believe that? I do.