A Piece About Beauty

Ever since I was little, my friends and family would always compliment me and tell me how beautiful I was. As nice as it was to hear, I could never see it for myself. I know a lot of people would write this piece after they have discovered themselves and their beauty, but that's just not me. One thing that I've realized recently is both my increase and decrease in self confidence. I feel myself growing more and more confident as I grow older, but I am positive that it is not because of my looks. As I have grown, I have gained more and more skills that have built me into the person I am today. I have learned to love the person I am, such as my ability to be creative and the skills I have just started to gain like talking to people. After I started to work, I realized that talking to people I didn't know became much easier than it had before. That in itself had changed my confidence game. I suddenly realized how much fun it was to talk to people and I became much more outgoing. Every now and then, I find it hard to speak, even still, but it doesn't bring me down anymore. It's okay to be shy sometimes, and that's just part of what makes me me. But as I get older, I see my self confidence in my outer beauty decreasing. When I was younger I had thought that as I continue to age, I would finally be comfortable in my own skin. What I know now is that I either haven't reached the age where that is true yet, or adults are really really good at not showing that they are insecure. I still listen to what my friends and family tell me, and I know that everything they say is true, but I just don't see it. I know it's true because every once in a while, I wake up, look in the mirror and I truly love the person that I see. However, that doesn't happen very often and I keep trying to make it permanent but it never seems to adhere. College is where everything really turned everything confusing for me. All of a sudden I was surrounded my hundreds and thousands of beyond beautiful girls, who could walk around and look gorgeous without even trying. Of course I befriended every single one of them which just made my self esteem plunge. Take my friend Devyn for example. She is one of the prettiest people I know and she owns it. She never wears makeup and looks like a goddess, and she is always pumping herself up and talking about what at "bad bitch" she is. She has the confidence that I have always wanted, and although I'm jealous of her mega-awesome good looks, she has taught me so much about loving who I am. She hypes me up and compliments me and just makes me smile when I'm feeling down. I've learned that it's nearly impossible for someone else to love you, if you don't love you first. It is so unhealthy to love someone without first becoming at least somewhat comfortable with the person you are. I am working really hard to become that person for both me, and the people around me. College was kind of refreshing to me, because we all stepped on that campus together. We all experienced the freshman 15, and we all pumped each other up. Never in my life have I see girls boost each others self esteem as much as I did as soon as I walked into a college dorm. I first met my friend Lily while my head was over a sink in the bathroom. She approached me right away and just started talking. Meanwhile, I was just chilling, with my face in the sink like "dude I can't see you give me a sec." As soon as I pulled my head from the faucet, I looked up and wondered why a girl like her was talking to a girl like me. My first thought was "wow, this girl has got to be a mermaid or something." I was wrong, but it turns out that she lives at the beach, so was I really far off? Anyway, I figured that we could never actually be friends because she was absolutely beautiful, and I was just plain old me. Turns out I was wrong... again. Lily ended up being one of my best friends and I don't know what I would do without her. I guess the moral of my story is that looks really don't matter as much as we all think they do. We are all the same underneath, so why does it matter so much. We are all so caught up is looking the best, and blowing everybody away with out impressive selfies, that we forget what it's truly like to be human. Human's aren't perfect, nothing is. I'm still working on it, but I'm starting to find more love in myself and I've started to care a little bit less about what everyone else looks like, because if they all love me, then I can too.

Lily and I