I had a boyfriend once.
He told me I was pretty, but I needed to change
everything about myself to be
Beautiful.
He said there was a difference between “pretty”
And “beautiful”
And if I wanted to be “beautiful” I would have to change my personality to fit with his, my clothes so they wouldn’t clash with his and my skin tone so I wouldn’t make him look pale.
He said that for him to be beautiful,
I had to be beautiful first.
So I did change.
I changed my personality so that I slotted into his life like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle.
I changed what I wore so that he stood out when the two of us were standing together.
I stopped fake tanning so my complexion went back to my natural shade of pearly white
So that his Mediterranean skin glowed like the sun,
While the white plastic covering that enrobed me reflected his light.
When we broke up,
I couldn’t bear to look at the person
That I had become.
The mirror hanging on the back of my bedroom door
Became an object of disgust.
No girl should be forced to cover a single piece of glass with a black sheet to stop themselves from crying.
No girl should be forced to change themselves time and time again
Just so that they can fit with whoever they are with.
Every girl was born in a way
So that the world could see their beauty at first glance,
Not so that the world has to dig deep into the persons past secrets to see who they really are.
The models that we see in magazines
And on billboards around the place
Show the world today.
It shows how we, members of society, say that for girls to be “beautiful”
They have to have hollow bones like the ones found in baby birds,
They have to pile shit loads of chemicals in liquids, powders and creams
Onto their faces to cover up the natural perfections.
They tell us that if we don’t like who we are
We can change,
But they tell us to change for us, not anyone else.
“Anyone else” are the very people that tell us to change.
Society tells us to change.
We tell each other to change.
We tell ourselves to change.
