I’ve noticed a really not cool trend lately regarding the female body. It’s not a good enough mind fuck to be labeled too small or too big lately, now we are being based on measurements. Basically ladies, we will never be good enough. Ever. But don’t you worry, there is every kind of procedure under the sun to get us “there”. Gross. It wasn’t bad enough to think about how to explain to our daughters that they are beautiful the way that they are, but now we have to worry about talking them out of getting ass implants.

The thing is, I do it to myself all the time. I’m never good enough. If you give me the ability to, I will pick myself apart. All while preaching to my friends that they shouldn’t do that because I think that they are gorgeous. I know the internal struggle. The feeling that no matter what you do, you’ll always be the girl that needs work. I’ve encountered it my whole life. At my biggest I was called fat and was told that I needed to lose weight. At my smallest people whispered that I had an eating disorder, even though they saw me jogging and walking every night. All that did was take away my hard work in one bitchy sentence and make my self esteem dip even lower.

The reason why I’m talking about this is because I worry about you. All of you. Women at every age, at every body type, that listen to what they think they should be. I realized this the other night when one of my friends was telling me about a nude photo shoot she was involved in that celebrated women’s bodies. Every weight and every shape. I had told her that I didn’t think I would ever have the self esteem to partake in something like that and that I would “never feel good enough”. Her exact response was “you’re inherently good enough just by being yourself”. I cried. I had never heard that before. Sure, I have been called beautiful before, but I have never been outright told that being myself was good enough. It hit home. I’m now passing it on to you.

I have heard everything when it comes to women’s bodies. How people could “never be with someone” that weighed over a certain weight. Or that celebrating a full figure is celebrating the choice to be unhealthy. Celebrating yourself doesn’t have to have anything to do with health. We celebrate supermodels every day that have smoked cigarettes for decades. That’s not exactly the picture of health. Celebrating yourself means knowing that you’re good enough, and owning it. I admire women that have that outlook. That outlook is healthy, and we should all aspire to be a little bit more like them.

The breakdown here is that no matter what you’re working with, some ass is going to pop out of the bushes and tell you that you aren’t good enough. If you are thin, you need to be more curvy. You will be compared to boys and be called flat. You will be told you have no ass and that you need to eat a sandwich. You will be pinned for having an eating disorder. If you’re a plus size you are deemed unhealthy. You will be told you need to lose weight or that you could be thinner. If you’re the middle of the road, then you get the best of both of those worlds. You’re curvy, but in the wrong places. You could be thinner. People will call it your “in between” stage. You can never win.

I get it. No one wants to be told that they look bad. There is nothing worse than when you get ready to go out and have a sliver of self esteem, some raging assface comes by and ruins it for you. As much as a lot of women say that they don’t care about how they look, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be told that you look nice. It’s normal. It’s human. You deserve to be given a compliment, and not a backhanded one either. An honest and genuine compliment that makes you feel nice. No matter what your body size is. Especially since it takes about forty compliments to make up for the one negative, because once that seed is planted, it’s there forever.

I don’t have any answers for you. I can tell you everyday that you can’t listen to negativity and that you need to remind yourself that you’re beautiful. I feel as though I don’t have the right. I go through the exact same thing. Just because I have my game face on when I leave my house doesn’t mean that I didn’t just have a good cry in the shower before I got ready. My self confidence isn’t what it seems. I’m just happy to be out. It’s not that in the back of my mind I’m not worried about being judged for how I look, it’s that I’m not wasting my time with a negative attitude. I want to enjoy myself, plain and simple. Whether my pants fit or not.

So for those of you that feel stuck in the vicious body hating circle, try to be easier on yourself. Try to be easier on other women. Stop adding to the cycle. Everyone is built differently. We aren’t all supposed to be the same. We can embrace and support each other in the low self esteem cause and try to build each other up. Maybe that will be the way that we see how we actually look. How we actually look and how we feel we are supposed to look are two incredibly different things. And it screws us up. So if you are having a bout of not feeling great, I will leave these last words with you. Screen shot them, write them on your mirror, repeat them daily if you have to. Just please remember them. “You’re inherently good enough just by being yourself”.