You don’t have to bare your body to be beautiful. They do not tell us the whole story of beauty. They cannot guarantee our success in anything of value (or they shouldn’t). They cannot tell us what we will do in the future. Our bodies are beautiful-no matter what their shape or size, but they are not who we are. Maybe some of them enjoy the stares they get because of the way they look in a string bikini, but it’s because their worth has gotten all tangled up in how they look, and they need the reminder, too: Our bodies do not define us as women. They could care less what people think.Īnd maybe it’s true. The girls with perfect bodies don’t have any problem baring themselves. It’s a lie, a deep-seated one that reaches it hands into a teenage society that says if you don’t uncover like all the others there must be something wrong with your body. The world likes to tell us that our worth as women lies in our bodies-and in summertime that means how we look in a bikini. We’re asked to leave little to the imagination-and that little becomes littler every year. Sure, we’re asked to share those secrets freely every summer. Like whether your stomach jiggles at all when you walk.). Like whether you have a thigh gap like all the supermodels. Hear me, little sister: Some things weren’t meant to be shared (Like the shape of your breasts outside a triangle of cloth. All of it claims you will be able to find the perfect bikini (try this particular style for your shape!) for your perfect-as-is body (Even if you have a bigger-than-you’d-like belly, feel proud to wear this revealing piece of cloth that will teach you to view beauty in a better way!) and still feel comfortable in it (It doesn’t matter what you look like! We can make you look and feel great!).Īll these messages can leave you feeling angry and disappointed and most of all unbeautiful. Let me say that again: YOUR BODY DOES NOT DEFINE WHO YOU ARE. But there is a bigger picture (there always is), and it is this: Your body does not define who you are. It’s not easy, when you’re young, to see the bigger picture. That’s not courage.Ĭourage is covering up in a society that doesn’t think you should. All it takes is a misguided connection between our bodies and who we are (“I am beautiful because of my perfect body”) to feel so comfortable with baring our bodies for the world to see, like it wants us to. We think courage looks like baring our bodies, because it’s much more frightening to peel off the over-shirt and stand proud with those bikinis covering only the tiniest outer pieces of us, isn’t it? We don’t think it looks like courage to cover up. I know how scary it is to try to defy convention. I know what it’s like to be the odd one out, to be the only one who’s uncomfortable in her own skin, to be the only one without a perfect body while all those others look like a page straight out of a magazine. Much easier said on the other side of 17, I know. Maybe it’s hard to see from your 17-year-old eyes right now, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: There never was much great about fitting in. This is what it takes to fit in, you say. But it’s summer, and it’s a swimsuit and there’s an expectation, and who are you to argue? In fact, you don’t really want to reveal whether you’re an “us” or a “them.” What you really want to do is cover up. There is all kind of talk about those girls without perfect bodies walking bravely around in bikinis and celebrating the different sizes and shapes of their bodies, but there is still an ideal, isn’t there? There is still an “us” and a “them,” and you don’t want to be a “them.” We live in a different world than we did when I was 17. There was nothing like watching all those other bikini-clad teenagers to make me realize I would probably never have what it takes. My body wasn’t perfect according to all those unspoken standards, and there was nothing like summer to make me remember all the ways I couldn’t measure up. I see you watch the ones who strut around in their strings so confidently and wish you could be them. I see you, when it’s time to get out, covering up just as quickly as you can, even if it means soaking the only clothes you brought with you. I see how you take that shirt off and slip off those shorts in record time and immediately slide into the water. If you don’t want to be ridiculed for being a prude or old-fashioned or ugly, you will have to wear one of those, too. You don’t look nearly as good as they do in a bikini (at least from your vantage point), and because of this, you feel uncomfortable baring so much of yourself in public. It can be a make-or-break season.Īll the other girls in your class are armed with their bikinis in a myriad of colors, and they have their perfect bodies with their perfect breasts and their perfect legs and their perfect skins.īut you.
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