Growing up watching movies, there was always this ideal female character in the movies. Tall, skinny, blonde hair, blue eyes. We’ve set role models for children through dolls and cartoon characters. Barbie has blonde hair, blue eyes, and perfect skin. Disney’s Mrs. Incredible has such dramatized assets, dainty arms, an impossibly skinny waist, voluptuous thighs yet dainty ankles.

Growing up we were taught that skinny is better. We watched countless ads for Weight Watchers, Noom, Keto and Mediterranean diets. We’ve been brainwashed as women from day one that skinny is better. Many girls have grown up in families where being skinny is the only option to feel a sense of value and worth from their mothers. We’ve grown up hearing the question “Are you seriously eating that right now?” Or the adults in our lives feeling the need to assert themselves into our crippling self-confidence, telling us to “enjoy it while you’re young because that, food will go straight to your hips when you’re my age.”

The days we’ve spent looking in the mirror every morning, tears of hate lingering on our waterlines, looking at the person staring back, both sharing feelings of self-hatred. The girls that have to ask themselves if these jeans make them look fat. Or the girls that feel that they have to hide their stomachs.

But what about the girls that are skinny? The girls that are the “ideal body type.” The girls that you see on the covers of magazines, the models. We still wake up in the morning and look at ourselves in the mirror wishing we could gain weight “in the right places.” We try countless methods to gain weight, go on a high-carb high calorie diet, lift weights, drink protein shakes. I’ve tried just about every trick in the book and I am still, as my peers like to call me, a “skinny mini.”

Being skinny isn’t always a blessing. It makes it almost impossible to find anything that fits when looking for clothes. We’ve tried shopping in both the adults’ and teens’ section to no avail, nothing works. Having to resort to the kid’s section is a bit insulting to me as an 18-year-old. (Even though the clothes are cheaper). I constantly find myself staring at myself in the mirror, zoned out in my own little world of “what ifs.”

“What if I was taller?”

“What if I had bigger thighs, a bigger butt?”

“What if I just weighed 20 lbs more?”

“Why do I need to gain weight?”  I ask all these questions, yet I don’t fully understand why, but ultimately, it is because I am unhappy with my looks.

This unhappiness has stemmed from years and years of trauma. Years of being talked down to about my weight. “You’re too skinny.”

“You need to eat more.”

“Are you anorexic? Do your parents feed you?”

To answer these statements, yes, I know I am skinny.  I’m trying to gain weight.  No, I am not anorexic (Don’t ask people that, it’s rude), and yes, my parents feed me, quite well actually.

In the end, everyone wants something that someone else has. There truly is no “ideal” body type because society goes through phases that deem a certain body type as preferential. But what may be ideal to me isn’t ideal to the girl next to me. We all walk around looking at people wishing we had something that they have. Ever heard of the saying, “the grass is always greener on the other side?”

But the truth is, it’s not.

The grass is the exact same on the other side, it’s just the angle you’re looking at it from and the way the light hits it.

But the grass that is ACTUALLY greener is the acceptance that no one is perfect. That’s the ideal we need to be striving for. The acceptance that if I like the way I look then I HAVE AN IDEAL BODY. Don’t be the one causing all of the spoiled brown spots on the other side of the grass so that your grass looks better. It’s okay to not be okay, and it is okay to be insecure, but don’t force your insecurities on others.