An Open Letter To Women

As a '90s baby who has grown up into a world that feels the need to categorize weight into clean-cut categories, when I saw that Barbie had released a "curvy" Barbie, I was ecstatic. I called my mom to tell her not to yell at me when she saw that some of my allotted food money was going to purchase a Barbie doll... at age 20. But then I began to investigate further and realized these dolls were a little to good to be true. While Barbie is certainly on to something with varying sizes, shapes, hair color, and means of expression for young girls, we are all still living in a Barbie world.

Most people who know me learned pretty early on that I LOVE to talk. However, one thing that a lot of people don't know is that I struggled with a speech impairment growing up. If you've ever heard a kindergartener talk, it is clear that they haven't learned how to say everything correctly yet. Most kids' speech improves as they get older, but for some, like me, talking the right way was really hard. I didn't even realize it until I began speech therapy in elementary school, but I couldn't even say words like "dog" or "cat" correctly. I also talked really fast, so that certainly didn't help anything. I never expected, though, that I would need speech therapy.

One in five people suffer from some sort of mental disease, the most common being anxiety and depression. When someone has a mental disease, that disease takes control over their mind and they are no longer the person that they really are. You become your illness.