“What’s your biggest insecurity?” My eighth grade homeroom teacher asked as she passed out blank adhesive name tags. Facing 30 sets of weary, bewildered eyes, she proposed a challenge. Ears perked up, heads shot up from desks, and expressions widened with curious anticipation as she announced “I challenge you to write your insecurity on a nametag and wear it for an entire school day.” In less than thirty seconds, I wrote out my tag and slapped it onto the front of my shirt.
I hate my body.
In middle school my school participated in an annual program called Challenge Day. This anti-bullying campaign hosted an off-campus event for selective students and faculty members. Although the event only took place on a single school day, and only a fraction of the student body attended, the entire school always engaged in various empowerment challenges for the remainder of the week– the name tag challenge being one of them.
Walking around the halls that day I remember seeing a great variety of name tags. My nose. My hair. My legs. My teeth. My butt. I stepped out of the classroom confident in my decision, but nervous to draw attention to my seemingly fatal flaw. Yet, it was hard to ignore the fact that each girl in the hallway that day sported very similar tags.
At the time, seeing these name tags lifted 100 pounds of discomfort off of my chest. I felt comfortable knowing that everyone else felt the same way as me. We called each other beautiful, we hugged one another, and everything seemed perfectly okay. 7 years later and I still think about that day in eighth grade. I still think about my name tag. It wasn’t okay.
I was 13 years old and my biggest insecurity was my body. 13 years old, 115 pounds, teetering over the edge of prepubescence, and my biggest insecurity was my body.
Thinking about this shatters my heart. Girls develop body image issues before they even make it to high school. Girls develop body image issues before they even hit puberty. The saddest part about this heart wrenching stigma is knowing that these problems have only worsened.
During my middle school years, the only popular social media platform was Facebook. It was the root of the social scene. Logging onto Facebook on our family desktop computers right after school was not only celebrated, but encouraged. Social communication revolved around Facebook chat and flip phone text message. Facebook posts consisted of “tbh” statuses and face-only selfies from a dangerously high angle. Life was so simple, but it seemed so hard.
Young girls now hold the root of their insecurities in the palm of their hand. Snapchat, twitter, instagram, tumblr, facebook, vsco, tinder, and so many other social media applications are not only taking over the lives of girls at a disturbingly young age, but exposing them to unnatural insecurities and false senses of reality. These girls dont have to wait until they get home to get online, or fight with their siblings over who gets to use the computer first, or lie to their parents about making a facebook account so they don’t get grounded.
Imagine the pressures we feel to look and act a certain way in college. We feel that way because of the media and because of society’s perception of beauty. We scroll on the explore page and see beautiful women with seemingly perfect clothes, and perfect bodies, and perfect hair, and perfect lives. We look down at the sweatpants we haven’t washed for three weeks, the bowls of easy mac we ate for lunch and dinner, our empty bank accounts, the fact that we didn’t exercise once during midterm week, and we feel shitty.
Now, imagine being 13 years old. You’re experiencing puberty, and nerves about high school, and crushes, and periods, and confusion. Those girls see the same explore pages that we do. Those girls have the same social media accounts that we do. Those girls are feeling the same pressures and that we are, but they never had a chance to grow up without them.
As an extremely bubbly, boisterous, and driven individual, I have never experienced issues with confidence or self-worth. I have always valued my strengths and celebrated my passions in everything that I do. The only thing that has ever held me back in this world is an insecurity I developed in middle school, an insecurity I developed without any real exposure to the pressures of social media.
When I think about my struggles as a budding teenager I think about my two little sisters. I hope my sisters never have to feel even half of the pain I felt growing up. I hope my sisters never think of themselves as any less than beautiful, passionate, and worthy members of society. Until the end of my days I will never stop fighting for all girls to realize just how wonderful they are, no matter what the media tells them. It is up to us to make these girls feel welcome in a world obsessed with impossible standards.
But how can we empower young girls when we feel the same pressures?
Think of yourself as a role model in everything that you say and do. Use social media to empower yourself and empower others. Girls look up to us. They watch the things we do in our community, they read the things we post, they see the pictures we take, they feel the differences we make. Our generation sets the tone for the generations to come. You don’t have to be a big sister or have a relationship with a younger girl to be a role model. Promote positivity. Eliminate fat talk. Stop using skinny as a compliment. Inspire others with your individuality. Spread love.
I believe that the fight for equality will persist until we stop letting social pressures and beauty standards rule our lives. You are more than your looks, you are more than your body, you are more than a stereotype, you are more than media trends allow you to portray. Insecurities become deep rooted at a very young age. It’s a timeless phenomenon that worsens with the growth of media. Empower young girls before the pressures of social media shut them down. We have to take a stand.