I love myself. Not in the obnoxious shove-it-in-you-face love yourself, nor the I-think-I-am-perfect love myself, just a silent and accepting love for who I am.
I recently attended a lecture here at UCLA required by my sorority which featured one of the original women from the Dove Beauty Campaign: she also loves herself, and she spoke to me and other college women about body positivity and women's health. At some point in the presentation, the speaker said Dove's research found that only 4% of women can honestly say that they love themselves.
That means 96% of the women sitting in that room with me at that moment could not say that they loved themselves. That means 96% of my sorority sisters, my best friends, could not say that they love themselves.
Although I was truly taken aback by that statement, it somehow did not seem to surprise me.
Most of us are constantly bombarded with standards of beauty, whether through Instagram or on TV; we all know what beauty is supposed to look like--what is the ideal hair color? waist size? The answer comes to your mind immediately--even if you do not necessarily believe it--because it is something the media has ingrained in our minds to be true.
pc https://www.instagram.com/p/B1cNOWvnFqs/
The environment that Instagram creates can be genuinely vicious: we robotically compare ourselves to every bikini picture we see, zooming in to someones waist to find proof it is not real and following that by editing your own waist to make it look better than hers.
If it's not that, then we are talking trash about how that girl has such expensive clothes and travels to all these beautiful places.
As unrealistic and cheesy as it sounds, I wish everyday that 100% of girls could say they love themselves.
Imagine a world where we could all be happy for each other instead of feeling resentment or jealousy. Queue my Instagram.
Back story on my instagram, it was created my freshman year of high school (2015 if anyone was wondering) after I victoriously deleted an account that was already brewing unhealthy habits within it.
I had also just moved from San Diego to Chicago where I knew absolutely no one and was free to be whoever the heck I wanted.
I decided that my Instagram would be a place where I would showcase my family, my friends, and other aspects of my life that I cared to share with the world. I did not want a single person to look at my Instagram and feel embarrassed, jealous, or excluded; instead, I want people to laugh or feel inspired by pictures with absolutely no airbrush or photoshop.
pc https://www.instagram.com/maddie_wiygul
My now best friend told me that after the first time we met, she went home and did what we all do after meeting someone: she stalked my Instagram.
She admitted that she was having a shitty day because her and her ex were having problems, and that while egregiously stalking me she found one of my pictures captioned with dozens of my favorite quotes and sayings that I have gathered throughout my life.
She told me she sat there in her sadness and read every single one of them (there's literally like 40 of them) and afterwards she felt empowered and confident. That right there validated the entire point I had been trying to convey.
To know that, without my personal interference whatsoever, someone's day changed in the slightest because of something I did is the most amazing feeling and is really all I had ever hoped for with this account.
I now hope that someone reading this might feel inspired to change the way their followers feed off their content online.
It's so important to be mindful online because no one can predict how your digital footprint will affect other people.
