At the end of my sixth grade year, the most amazing librarian I have ever met recommended a book for me. I went into the little upstairs room looking for something simple that I could get through quickly for my silent reading part of study hall, not the beginning of a passionate love affair with the written word. I went up to the little librarian, who told me, with sparkling eyes, that I should try Flipped by Wendelin Van Drannen and pointed to the shelf it was proudly sitting on. I remember looking at the little upside down yellow chick on the white cover thinking “this is going to be one stupid book.” But since study hall was almost over and I did not want to hear anything else about books, I took it and went. I finished the book that night. Pouring over the pages, I got caught up in the story and the morals and the idea of something greater than the sum of its parts. That one little book started half a decade of reading every book I could get my hands on, gushing over the brilliance of an author to anyone who was unlucky enough to get me on the topic, and becoming a full fledged nerd. 

Words have the ability to become the most powerful thing in a person life. A story can change the way you see the world and people, it can stir up a longing in you to do good or to travel, it can transform your identity. In some ways it’s more powerful than visual media in that it is all performed by you. When I’m reading a story, I am the main character, I feel, see, and learn everything they do. This in turn, gets transferred into my life. But that’s not always positive. In books, like with visual media, the main character is skinny, with an effortless beauty that attracts the perfect guy who makes you smile like an idiot while reading, and in the end everything is solved with both people growing and becoming something better. Real life isn’t like that; it’s not so easily solved with people so perfect. Trying to see real life through the opaque glass of a novel is one of the hardest things you have to deal with when you are a reader.

When I was a young child I lived on a farm where I was outside running all the time. We didn’t have a lot of TV, I didn’t like reading, and the home school co-op that we were a part of was very limited in what they considered alright for Christian families. So I didn’t have much access to the real world. When I made the switch to public school and started to realize that there is much more than chickens and being overly appropriate, I started to see myself in a different way. In seventh grade I became very acutely aware of my appearance. I wasn’t the effortlessly skinny beautiful person that I read about every day. I was heavy, thick, with blemished skin, and hair that always seemed to be oily. Added to the fact that I was a more introverted person who was friends with the IT crowd as I like to call them (IT being more so information technology than IT as in cool kids, I was one of the nerds) I didn’t fit into my standards of what made someone beautiful.

I let myself be lured into the chasm of self pity. The people I hung out with were like me, uncomfortable in their own skin, not sure of what they wanted to do with themselves, basically the average middle schooler. I think this is where many of the body image problems stem from. In the adolescent years, you are just getting to become a person, before that you were a young child who was learning the basics and was happy all the time because life was easy. Starting in the middle school years, you begin to have more freedom to choose who you want to become, what your dreams are, and it’s also one of the hardest times in young life. The pressure poured at you from family, friends, teachers, and even your own expectations can either help you grow or stunt you. I fell into the second group.

Now, I didn’t become depressed, I never delved with self harm or any disorders. I just let that little insecurity live in the back of my mind and moved on. I played sports, took piano lessons, and wrote all the time because I was convinced that I would be a writer some day. I made really great friends and lost some, went through one stage or another of growing up and was fine. I got a little grouchier and a bit bitter, but it was nothing that really caused any worry. I didn’t really see the negative side of insecurities until the end of eight grade when I heard about people I knew that were cutting themselves and doing drugs. It was a complete shock that people who I saw everyday that were laughing and talking with such energy could be intentionally hurting themselves. Especially since that carried on into High School and will probably follow them for the rest of their lives and can become something much more serious. Suicide rates are dramatically rising and have been steadily rising in the past 10 years. A New York Times study shows a sharp increase in suicide rates, in middle aged people. Adults, who had body issues or were treated like they weren’t good for anything, grew up believing the lies thrown at them. The problem starts with people who don’t think about consequences that their actions can inflict. Or they think that the insecurity a teen feels is just a phase and that it’s best to ignore it. Leaving that insecurity to fester and boil inside until they feel like the only way out is death. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t try to help the people I knew. I didn’t even think much about it after I heard it. I was too caught up in myself, in my miniscule problems, to see that they needed help or someone to try and understand what they were feeling.

Now that I am a senior in High School I am able to understand the gravity of the words used towards adolescent kids. Always created a commercial that is very inspirational to me; they brought in a bunch of people and asked them to demonstrate how to do things ‘like a girl’. It was like a joke, they did everything silly and weak like girls are portrayed most of the time. Then they were asking why and how it affects young girls and a participant named Erin responded “I think it defiantly drops their confidence and really puts them down… cause they think there’re a strong person and it’s kinda like telling them that they’re weak.” It’s not just telling someone that they aren’t pretty or that they look fat, treating someone like they are weak will result in a weak person. Then the next wave of adults will be small minded and will follow what they are told blindly because that’s what has been expected and forced upon them. It’s really important to think about the way that we treat and talk to young people, because the emotional trauma of some seemingly small comment can have repercussions for years to come.

I wonder a lot about what it would be like to go back and reverse the way I thought about myself in middle school. If I had never read Flipped, starting my journey into the world of self-doubt and anxiety, I wonder if I would be happier or more confident. Would I have the same goals in life if I didn’t go through adolescence like I did? Because of my experiences I have a great desire to make sure that young girls don’t feel the way I did about myself back then. I want to help eradicate the world of media that depicts unreachable standards for girls. I want people realize that there is beauty in every size, shape, color, and background. Not in exaggerated makeup and the defined muscles we crave to see. In a SoulPancake video (That’s What She Said: Beauty and Body Image) there is a lady who states that “At some point we demanded that. We wanted to see skinnier pretty people up there [on TV]. And the more we saw that the more we wanted to become that.” We are so much more than the sum of our parts; sparkling eyes are just eyeballs, a confident walk is just a swing of the hips, radiant smiles are just teeth and lips, contagious laughs are just noise, but put them together and you’ve got true magical beauty. It isn’t because of a ton of makeup or how long you can run without gasping up a lung. And I think that once we as a society are able to believe in individual self worth and the truth that individuals are beautiful the way that they are, that everyone is so much more than the sum of their parts, then society can achieve amazing things.